


zugzwang

by potted_music



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, M/M, Omega Verse, omega resistance movement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 05:53:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 32,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3925321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Harry got recruited, he expected his career in Kingsman to be not altogether dissimilar from a Bond movie. It is, kind of, except that instead of a colourful villain, he has to deal with an omega resistance movement, instead of a Bond girl, he gets a surly Scot who would shoot him for the designation, and, most important, he no longer has any idea whom he can trust. He should have become a tailor instead.</p><p> </p><p>A fill of this prompt @ dressing-room3: "Late 80s, Omegas are still regarded as weak and inferior, so many eyebrows are raised when young Merlin was placed as a candidate. Omega, unbonded. Everyone thought that he'd be the first to go, that an omega couldn't get into Kingsman because they were weaker, docile, slaves to their hormones.<br/>But he proved them wrong. Arthur still refused to put him out in the field, so he became the go to handler. A lot of the older knights tried to get him to mate with them, doing a variety of not so nice things, until Galahad, the second youngest agent, decided to be Merlin's personal watchdog."</p><p>Hit the character limit, the rest of the prompt <a href="http://dressing-room3.livejournal.com/405.html?thread=731029#t731029">here</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a newcomer to the A/B/O trope, so my undying gratitude goes to cathexys and marina, who listened to me blabbering on and on about the plotbunny and assured me that, while all elements of this have been done, they have not necessarily been done in this exact combination, and, anyway, every trope worth doing is worth doing until everybody goes blue in the face telling you to stop.

“With all due respect sir, the IRA theory is bullshit.”

Arthur raises a polite eyebrow at Merlin in the expression that was known to have made experienced field agents cower in fear. He should have known that Merlin, his face a perfect mask of composed calm, wouldn’t back down an inch, Harry thinks with impertinent pride. In the taut silence, the distant noises from the street, early afternoon traffic and muffled voices, grate on his nerves, the photographs on the projector showing them for what they are: flimsy and vulnerable screens that can easily rip and burn. Harry is about ready to barge in when Arthur finally asks, “And why would that be?”

“Five words,” Merlin stretches out a hand clenched into a fist and straightens out his fingers as he counts the words, “illegal heat suppressors. Abortion tourism.”

Arthur snickers. “I’ll have to rely on your superior knowledge of those matters.”

There are several chuckles around the table, which makes Harry want to break things. He resolutely walks over to the projector and reaches for the clicker. Merlin slides it along the tabletop the last several inches, carefully avoiding touching. Harry nods in gratitude and clicks through several slides. “This is not guncotton or jelly. They have reliable access to quite large quantities of Semtex.”

He keeps going over the photographs: burned-out buses like mangled skeletons, houses with sooty petals blossoming out of empty windows, ripped metal origamis of what used to be post boxes or trash cans, splatters and fragments and shreds of what used to be human. Always the same graffiti in the background: a gun drawn into the letter omega. Vindictively, he stops the slideshow on a close-up of a child’s arm, found several yards away from the rest of the child. Harry crosses his arms over his chest. “Point is, they are working with someone, and maybe we should not fixate on just one theory.”

“But the PIRA are socialists. Don’t they claim that it was the English imperialism that brought the oppression of omegas to Ireland?” Percival sneers, leaning maybe a little too far across the table.

“Well, if you positively insist on wasting our time and admiring the light show,” Merlin, his eyes narrowed, gestures towards the screen without looking around, “we can approach them, probe the ground. I have all the necessary bona fides.”

“Absolutely not,” Arthur says. 

“Sir, as an unbonded omega, I am a perfect fit for the kind of cover we would want to use.” Harry’s not sure if he imagines it or if there really is a hint of a blush on Merlin’s cheekbones as he finishes speaking without looking up from his papers once. He spends enough time around Merlin to be mostly used to his smell, but it all adds up now, the jitters earlier today, that carefully avoided touch, Percival leaning across the table- he must be in heat, if blunted by the meds. Harry feels guilty for the realization, and oddly protective. Against his will, his hands clench into fists.

At least Arthur seems perfectly oblivious. “Aside from the usual objections, the Field Reconnaissance Unit sent an omega agent to infiltrate this Omega Liberation Front, and he went missing within the space of a couple of weeks. We are not risking you on approaching PIRA. You know too much.”

At that, Merlin finally perks up. “Do we have all the files on him?”

Arthur shrugs. “The army boys are traditionally unforthcoming. We have some scraps second-hand from MI6, but it’s not much. Harry, you are on it, Merlin, you are his backup.”

As the meeting ends and the agents disperse, Harry stays behind, waiting for Merlin. When the last stragglers finally leave, Harry sits down as far from Merlin as the table would allow, and asks, “How are you?”

Merlin takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes before answering. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Don’t you love those days when your brain jumps effortlessly from creative new ways of murdering people to a startling and heart-felt realization that Arthur seems quite fertile?”

Merlin took to shaving his head bald recently, which was supposed to make him look like hired muscle, Harry supposes, but only succeeded in making him look vulnerable. Harry hungrily ogles the knobs of his vertebrae at the back of his neck, tiny bones, so easy to crush; he swallows hard to dispel those thoughts, and flashes his most nonchalant smile. “Arthur? Ew.”

“Under normal circumstances, I would concur, but suppressors do only so much to dull the edge,” Merlin says, perching his glasses back up, slightly crookedly, at the bridge of his nose.

“Seriously, Arthur? There are so many much better candidates,” Harry points his thumbs at himself.

Merlin lets out a short raspy laugh. “Oh, don’t you worry, your abs hold a special place in my heart.”

“Unlike Arthur, I don’t think that you would be a liability in the field,” Harry says slightly petulantly.

Merlin tilts his head to the side like a curious large dog. “Am I supposed to congratulate you on that?”

At least it seems like Merlin’s amused rather than hurt by his daftness, Harry notes with relief. He reaches into his pocket and clutches a deformed bullet that grazed his skull during a mission in Sardinia last year. The only thing that stood in a quarter-breath between him and death was Merlin barking “Down,” and he listened before he had time to think, not fast enough to have survived unscathed, but survive he did. He places it on the table between them.

“What is this?” Merlin narrows his eyes, scrutinizing the bullet with a dispassionate interest of someone who hangs out at mortuaries out of general scientific curiosity.

“Sardinia,” Harry smiles, sweeping the bullet back into his pocket. “If not for you, I would never have dodged this one. But you were there, and I did, so this is now proof of my immortality.”

“Ew right back at you,” Merlin says, but there’s genuine warmth in his smile. “And you carry that around?”

“I don’t know what you are on about. I washed it, and all.” Harry breathes in and blurts the next phrase out before he has time to reconsider. “We could mate, you know. I think Arthur would be more willing to let you into the field-”

Merlin raises his gaze at Harry, and his eyes are so tired that Harry cannot help flinching back. Quickly, he adds, “Forget it. Sorry, that’s the hormones messing with my brain, is all.”

After scrutinizing him for another moment, Merlin finally relaxes, tension visibly draining out of his posture, and starts rifling through a stack of files in front of him. “So, about that agent that went missing-”

These are off-limits, Harry notes in his mind: Arthur’s office, unless nobody’s watching; new prototypes at the armory, unless you have a death wish; Merlin.


	2. Chapter 2

“This contraption of yours will never take,” Harry says, clutching an unwieldy wireless mobile telephone to his ear and rifling one-handed through the drawers in the flat of the agent who went missing. “Sometimes a gentleman just needs some privacy. This does not feel like privacy.”

On the other end of the line, Merlin chuckles. “Just you wait and see. The illusion of being needed trumps privacy any time. Once the technology spreads, we will be clamouring for these, hoping that someone, somewhere would want to call us.”

“Admit it already, you just wanted to hear my voice,” Harry purrs into the receiver.

“Always, Harry. That goes without saying,” and Harry can hear the grin in Merlin’s voice, can imagine, down to the last line, what his face looks like right now.

The flat smacks of a badly thought-out cover story. Harry scans his surroundings one more time. It does seem like the type of place that a young man of well-inculcated conservative tastes and ample resources would go for, all dusty pastels and patio chairs under palm trees that already started wilting, a framed St Andrews diploma on the wall a nice finishing touch; however, it is too of a piece, with none of the mismatched ill-fitting debris one accumulates over the lifetime of changing interests and herding relatives who bring assorted trinkets back from vacations. With a certain measure of pride, Harry thinks of his own Kingsman house that came pre-furnished, but customized with a butterfly collection in the bathroom and a coins collection next to the front door.

“There’s nothing here indicating struggle. Or anything by way of a personality, really.” The search is frustrating and largely pointless, Harry knows. The army must have gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb before Kingsman, or even MI6, got wind of it, collecting both any evidence they might find useful, or anything that could be construed as incriminating. “He left an unfinished blister of heat suppressants behind, but that’s probably the only indication that something’s amiss.”

There’s a pause, and then Merlin carefully says, “We should not discount defection either. He was in the army. In the army, an omega is much more likely to commit suicide than be killed in action. And by suicide, I mean that a body would be found behind the barracks covered in cigarette burns and with a beer bottle shoved up his arse, and it would be ruled suicide. After dealing with that, one might be more easily persuaded to join in on random acts of violence.”

Harry knew that Merlin was recruited out of the Royal Military Police, but he never thought to ask why the man decided to make that switch, having always assumed that Kingsman was the most exciting adventure available to young men of a certain stature. He was grateful that Merlin did, but he took him for granted, and he’d never thought that thwarting genocidal megalomaniacs with ambitions of world domination might have been Merlin’s grand way of choosing his battles.

“Oh,” Harry breathes out softly, not knowing what to say, and then a sudden thought strikes him. “Would you? If you were not Kingsman, would you consider joining them?”

The pause drags on for far too long, and then Merlin sneers with derision, “Calm down, I will not flip on you and blow your sorry alpha ass up. No, I would not join them. Not out of any deep-seated ideological disagreements, mind you, because I probably have more in common with them than with Arthur, or with you, for that matter.” 

At that, Harry makes a protesting noise, but Merlin continues, words coming ever faster, as if he was desperate to get them out before Harry interrupted, or to persuade Harry. “I wouldn’t because their methods seem counterproductive. There are already curfews for omegas in certain areas, and my friends say they are now whisked for random checks-”

“Wait, you have friends who are-” Harry blurts out before he has time to think, and grinds to a halt after he does. Lamely, he finishes, “who are not in Kingsman?”

“Oh, but do have the decency to finish,” Merlin hisses, his Scottish brogue suddenly more pronounced, as it often is when he is on the verge of losing control. “What I love about you, _Galahad_ , is your complete lack of hypocrisy. Others would have couched that sentence in ‘that’s a valuable perspective,’ or some such, but not you. And to answer your question, yes, I do have omega friends. So did you, at least one, last I checked.”

“I’m an idiot,” Harry says, quietly knocking his fist against the wall for emphasis.

“Well, you are lucky to have me to think all the deep thoughts for you.” Merlin’s tone is still scathing, but Harry hopes that is the sign of forgiveness.

Harry was so good at being liked that he never had reasons to learn to apologize, which is an arrangement that he is mostly perfectly content with, if not for situations such as this. Slowly, he clenches and unclenches his fists, and says, syllable by a careful syllable, “I didn’t mean that, it, whatever it came out sounding like. I- Kingsman is incredibly lucky to have you, and any day now I expect MI6 and CIA to have a shootout on Savile Row over the right to spirit you away to work for them. Not to mention that you are my favourite person in Kingsman.”

At that, Merlin finally breathes out a laugh. “Oh, I know. That makes it worse.”

“Well, happy now? Let’s go do some work.” With a snicker, Harry spreads out the fliers and business cards that he found in the drawers. “These are all the contacts for omega unions that I found- there’s no knowing if there were not more before the army got here, but let’s try to figure out if the Liberation Front is not recruiting through any of these.”

“And you expect every omega to know what any other omega is doing because we are what, a hive mind?”

Harry flinches momentarily, but Merlin cannot suppress a chortle over the last words. “You are taking a piss, aren’t you?”

“I might be,” Merlin says smugly. “You’ll never know, until an explosion demolishes your private bathroom, along with half of the Kingsman estate.”

“I’ll try harder to deserve it,” Harry sighs, and gets to the business cards. “Do you know what PolFed(o) is?”

“Police Federation, omega branch. Basically, a trade union.”

“Right, not our guys then. Omega Rights are Human Rights.”

“Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing do-gooders, quite popular among that sort of clientele, but they would feed their opponents lentils until they shoot themselves rather than do any actual shooting. The man who runs it is a good friend.”

“Omega Youth Outreach?”

“Drop-in centers for at-risk teenagers, emergency contraception, meals, that kind of thing. If I were recruiting for a terrorist organization, that’s definitely where I would go, but I don’t see how they would fit our guy’s profile.”

“You do know a lot about these things,” Harry notes, without much surprise. He has come to expect Merlin to know everything.

Merlin, however, seems unamused. “You probably know a lot about Ascot, and fat load of good that did.”

Harry carefully places all the fliers and business cards where he found them, left inconspicuously among takeout menus and magazines, and waters the palms before he leaves. The case has a high enough casualty count as is, no need to add the innocent plants to it.


	3. Chapter 3

Having over the years been seconded to various military units on several progressively unpleasant assignments, Harry has figured out his own way of dealing with men who had seniority over him both in rank and in years, and who did not want to deal with him. The key to not getting the boot prematurely, he learned, lay in finely balancing flattery with intimidation, and at the moment, having on instinct nipped down to the barracks where the Field Reconnaissance Unit was stationed, he was more and more inclined to lay his intimidation on thick with each passing second.

“ _Colonel_ ,” he says to a lieutenant colonel barring his way, “I have no interest in that external police enquiry, it’s all bollocks and sordid business if you ask me-”

The man probably has neither the brain cells nor the emotional range to be worried, but Harry proceeds as if he did.

“Oh, you have not yet heard? Pardon, I should have double-checked the timeline.” He pats his jacket down, as if looking for a notebook. That finally gets him a reaction.

“Is that a gun in your inner pocket?” the man barks, poking him in the ribs with one stubby finger.

Harry suppresses all the inappropriate jokes that are already on the tip on his tongue, and with the studied nonchalance of a man who’s unfamiliar with situations where such gestures can get you full of shrapnel blithely reaches inside his jacket. He has a whole arsenal on him at all times, of course, but nothing as flashy as a gun at the moment.

“It is called a wireless mobile telephone,” he says, proudly showing off the unwieldy thing. “A friend says they will be all the rage in ten years or so.”

“I doubt that,” the man says without betraying the slightest curiosity.

“That makes the two of us,” Harry beams and considers clapping the man on the shoulder, but decides against it. “So, this external investigation business. They will start brandishing around all those long words, like collusion and uninvolved civilian casualties-”

“What are you on about?” the man tries, and fails, to stare at Harry down his nose, which is a trick that should not be tried on people who have a good six inches on you.

“Like I said, I have no interest in that particular case-”

“What do they have?”

Harry wonders if it is yet time to snap the trap, but decides to play some more.

“Oh, nothing of substance, I’m sure, or I wouldn’t have been the first to pay you a visit. I am, however, more interested in this other investigation of-”

“Stop wriggling like an eel,” the man finally snaps. “What are you on about?”

Harry narrows his eyes. “All I need is a five minutes’ talk with one of your subordinates. In private.”

“In my presence,” the man growls, without so much as asking whom or why Harry wants to talk to, which means that, in principle, they have a deal. Harry counts that as the first minor victory.

“I’d much rather you let us talk in private,” he cajoles, “strictly off the record, obviously.”

“And you’d rather not talk to him at all than put up with my presence?” There’s a glint in lieutenant colonel’s eyes that makes him uncannily resemble a massive and dangerous beast that makes up with brute force for what it lacks in shrewdness, a rhino maybe.

Conceding defeat, Harry lifts his hands in dismay. “I want to talk to a friend of one Lee Unwin.”

He knows he would not get much out of the man, the lieutenant colonel pacing in the background or not, but he just needs to check certain things.

“That’s a pending operation,” the man scowls, “we would not risk jeopardizing it.”

“Fine then. Thank you for your time,” Harry turns and starts walking away, knowing that he’ll be called back. Soon enough, he is; apparently, the lieutenant colonel is much less impassive than he lets on.

“Three minutes, in my presence,” the man concedes. “What are they investigating?”

“Oh, just some far-fetched claims that casualty numbers amongst Catholic uninvolved civilians skyrocketed ever since you started working with the Ulster loyalists. I’m sure that it will get cleared soon enough, but your investigation of the Omega Liberation Front might raise similar concerns, you see, so I want to establish Lee Unwin’s good character beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

The lieutenant colonel barks “Three minutes,” and waves at the man loitering at some distance from them. “Summon Spencer.”

They meet in a windowless room, stripped bare of any identifying details. James Spencer, a captain of the Medical Corps, is a clean-shaven, towering man – Harry’s minutely disconcerted at being in the presence of someone who’s even taller than he is – and a beta. Could have been worse, Harry sighs inwardly, but he secretly hoped for an omega. Well, at least the man’s a doctor, so he should be the first to know of anything untoward.

“Unwin was a good man, sir,” Spencer says with a wary sigh, “if they suspect unfair play, they are barking up the wrong tree.”

Noting the past tense, Harry brushes his concerns away with a wave of a hand. “Were there any recent incidents with omegas here? Or any of his friends at other bases? Anything at all?”

Spencer casts a quick glance at the lieutenant colonel, so pointed that Harry half-suspects that it was a show played out entirely on his behalf, and continues, “There might have been some jokes, you know how it is, but nothing major, not like at the other barracks.”

The lieutenant colonel does not miss an occasion to barge in. “We are fully committed to the safety of our omegas here.”

Before he can think better of it, Harry raises an eyebrow. A voice in his head smirks: for men who chose a career in the army, safety is not necessarily a primary concern, unlike knowing that your mates do treat you like a human being and have your back. That voice is uncannily similar to Merlin’s, who was the best recruit of his group and still got stuck indefinitely on handler duties.

“Ninety seconds,” lieutenant colonel notes, gloating.

Which is when the telephone in his pocket lets out a shrill trill. Harry briefly contemplates not picking up, but this is Merlin, and Merlin comes first.

“Where are you?” Merlin rasps, and Harry immediately knows that something is wrong.

“Field Reconnaissance Unit barracks. Do I need to-”

“Get the fuck out, the place is about to go up in flames, there’s been a tip-off.”

“Eighty,” lieutenant colonel adds.

“Out,” Harry yells, “the place is mined.”

All three of them run through the rooms and hallways, rounding up those loitering indoors on a nice day like this. Fortunately, there are not that many, but still, Harry’s hoarse from yelling by the end of the second floor. As he runs down the stairs, taking three at a time, there’s the first distant rumbling at the far side of the building. He dashes desperately for the door, and he’s barely past the threshold when a scorching, biting wave pushes at his back, and then everything goes blank.

He comes to in a blurry world robbed of sounds. There’s a wet patch on his cheek, and as he probes at it, there’s blood on his fingertips, flowing apparently from his ear. Well, at least he has all his limbs intact, he thinks, trying to get farther away from the barracks at an undignified swaying crawl on hands and knees. The contents of his stomach decide that they don’t like his gait, and he pukes on his arms.

He can feel something vibrate in his pocket, and stares at the telephone in wonder for a while, before he understands what he has to do.

“M’fine,” and the words come out more slurred than the distant, faint voice in his head likes. “Cannot hear you, but I’m safe. You are my prince in shining armor, mate. Not everybody gets a prince, but I’ll make do with a surly Scot, you smell nice.”

He’s distantly aware that he’s rambling, so he’s almost relieved when he drops the telephone, and his fingers are too stiff to pick it back up. He whispers “I’m fine” into it one last time, and continues his crawl away from the burning barracks.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s a warm human smell, sweat and dust, beckoning like the promise of safety on the other side of the expansive dull darkness. Gasping, he rises to the surface from the deep where there’s no _him_ , not as such, just blood sluggish with pain, and bones, and bile. He thrashes, trying to reach into that smell, knowing that it would all be fine if only he did, but he is rewarded with the rattle of the IV stands he is hooked up to, and a sharp pull in his arms.

“I’m here,” Merlin snipes, his voice ringing with irritation, and pushes him down.

Harry tries to laugh, then tries to say “Of course you are,” but the pain pulls him back under.

The next time he comes to, there’s less urgency to it. He lets himself relax into the feeling of safety, soaking up, past the hum of the machines and the shrill hospital smell, the knowledge, deeper than rational thought, that he’s home.

“I know you are awake,” Merlin says indulgently after a while, just a little bit too amused.

“How long have I been out?” Harry rasps, opening his eyes. Five-o’clock shadow makes Merlin’s cheekbones more pronounced, lending him an almost haggard look.

Merlin glances at the clock. “Seventy hours, give or take. High time you stopped with the Sleeping Beauty act, because last I checked, Sleeping Beauty is not supposed to have a catheter stuck in her dick, or any dick at all, period.”

Trust Merlin not to bother with sparing his feelings. Harry wonders if he wants the full laundry list of everything that is wrong with him, but decides against it.

And then it all comes crashing back, the search at the flat, the abortive interview at the barracks, the pain stitching the past to the present. Harry tries to sit up, only to be rewarded with a wave of dizziness.

“There’s a man, Captain Spencer, of Medical Corps,” he says quickly, lest he forgets or lest he passes out again, “he knows something, we need to get to him, I think he’ll talk. Is he okay?”

Something twisted and ugly, anger and fear and deep-seated resentment, passes over Merlin’s face, before it slips back to studied composure. Harry frowns. “Let it go. It’s out of our hands now. The police are taking over.”

“And you know nothing of the matter,” Harry drawls, raising an eyebrow.

After a pause that lasts longer than Harry is comfortable with, Merlin reluctantly agrees, “Some. Not much.”

Harry waits, but Merlin does not offer more, slouching back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. Merlin would disassemble a ticking bomb without breaking a sweat, would take Harry past enemy militias and drug rings without so much as bothering to put down his cup of tea, and would stare down a room full of alphas until they would agree to see sense, so his present reticence is unsettling. Against his will, Harry tenses, suddenly alert. Cautiously, as if navigating a badly-lit and heavily booby-trapped house, and just about as firmly, he says, “You know I’m in it with you.”

He does not know what it is, but there’s something, and he does not like it one bit.

Merlin just nods. “I know, and I wish you were not. Let it go, Harry. There’s nothing to be in.”

“Your nothing sounds like a something.” Drugged and dizzy, clinging to Merlin’s smell for his one indulgence, Harry cannot help thinking, with regret and vindictive possessiveness that he usually tries to keep in check, that maybe Merlin would have trusted him more had they mated. But then, Merlin must know that Harry is by his side not because of the compulsion of a bond, but because that is where he chooses to be, and because he cannot think of any better place.

Pushing his glasses up to his forehead, Merlin rubs at his eyes. “It’s just a mess, especially with the elections coming up. When was the last time you’ve even read the news?” 

“Back when I was a fresher, and it was supposed to be an adult thing to do,” Harry admits truthfully, and smugly adds, “I expect to be briefed on anything relevant that requires my immediate attention.”

“Well, maybe you should,” Merlin says levelly, not looking him in the eye. “Some of the headlines these days would make Stephen King proud, and I don’t even mean The Sun and the like. Everybody’s milking this mess for all it’s worth, because fear mongering is so much fun when your opponent cannot hit back.”

“But you did dig something up,” Harry presses, because this is what they do well, Merlin and him, uncovering that which was meant to be hidden, or making it disappear.

Merlin rises briskly and strides over to the window. Without looking at Harry, he barks, “We are independent subcontractors, not vigilantes. Do I need to bring you up to speed on the difference?”

Harry does not like the tense set of the shoulders, the way he nervously clenches his fists. It’s one of the first things they teach you in training, avoiding this type of pose, never letting on that things are not fully under control. Merlin wouldn’t act like this in front of the rest of the Round Table, and Harry wishes he wouldn’t with him either, because this he does not know how to deal with. “You don’t want to get involved,” he carefully says.

Merlin turns on his heels, glowering at Harry. “Oh, I wonder what could give you that impression?”

“Sarcasm does not suit you. The Merlin I know would not just sit back and hand everything over.”

“Well, shows how much you know.” 

“I know enough,” Harry says with utter conviction.

Merlin takes several long deep breaths before he speaks up again. Unclenching his fists with an effort, he asks, “How do you think I got here?”

“To this room? Lured by my manly charm, I would assume.” But Merlin just rolls his eyes, and Harry grows serious. “You are here because you were the best. Your marksmanship scores set an all-time record, your expertise in explosives makes me rather happy that you are on our side, and you plan the best missions. You are also the bravest man in any room.”

Merlin heaves a theatrical sigh. “I got here because I was lucky, and cautious. I was lucky not to have got mated to the wrong person when I first went into heat. I am also lucky in that I don’t look like a stereotypical omega, so everybody’s more likely to trust me. And then it was just caution. I don’t stick out. If someone sticks out and gets in deeper than he expected, I look the other way, and nod along when they destroy him. I don’t hide what I am, because, by the end of the day, I cannot, but I don’t flaunt it either. Yes, and I am the best, just so they’d think, ‘gee, that one’s good, not at all like the rest of them.’”

“I see,” Harry says, “is that so?” 

He wonders if that’s what Merlin thinks Harry is for him, a safety net in the organization that expects him to slip, and would take joy in his fall. From the way Merlin relaxes in his presence, lets slip the things that he would otherwise hide, Harry knows that that is not so, and he wonders why Merlin is now so intent on making him believe that it is.

“Well, how would you know?” Merlin says, suddenly very tired. “What you, all of you, chalk up to your own brilliance is all too often the shine of your silver spoon. You have no idea how much work, and what kind of work, anything takes for those without. Honestly, you don’t want to know either.”

“Is that all?” Merlin does not answer, so Harry spitefully adds, “The Merlin I know is not a coward.”

“No,” Merlin agrees softly, “but in some respects you are, and always will be clueless.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I commited 3700 words of fic today O___o I would not even consider that physically possible, but A/B/O is obviously doing THINGS to me XD (Also, I'm a huge comment whore, so if you want to say anything, please don't hold yourself back on my behalf XD )

“And whom did you have to blackmail in order to get the clean bill of health?” Merlin asks when Harry finally checks himself out of the medical wing and walks over to his office. Merlin does not have to look around to know that it’s him, and Harry wonders idly what gave him away. Of course, as his handler, Merlin is bound to know the rhythm of his footsteps, and to know and recognize Harry’s smell the same way Harry recognizes his.

Restless, exhilarated with his newly regained freedom, Harry goes for the expression of offended innocence, but laughter bubbles up and out instead, all the pent-up joy, intrinsic to who he is, that did not have much of an outlet through the weeks of him being confined to the medical wing. After a while, Merlin joins in, tension bleeding out of his posture; chuckling, he leans into Harry’s space and punches him lightly on the shoulder, and just like that, Harry does not have it in him to be angry at the bastard for never even visiting after their confrontation.

“I’m happy to see you too,” Harry snorts finally, and lifts his palm up for a high five.

“Just so you know, I’ve won the pool on how long they will manage to keep you in. The closest contender is two weeks off,” Merlin says smugly. “You should have stayed longer though. Not to mention that blackmail is illegal.”

“I laugh in the face of your distasteful allegations. Ha. Ha. Ha,” Harry pronounces each syllable carefully, like a separate word.

Merlin raises an eyebrow, and Harry finally gives in. “Morgana’s partial to me.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear that Arthur is thinking of sending you to Kuwait for a month or two. Easy work, perfect for a convalescent. From what I hear, you will mostly be sipping orange juice by the side of the pool at the local Reuters office.” Merlin tries to shuffle around the stacks of paper on his desk, and they collapse to his feet in an avalanche of carefully catalogued atrocities, riots in Kosovo mixing with the skirmishes in Senegal. Harry bends down to help Merlin to pick them up, but Merlin quickly crouches over the files, sweeping them protectively to his feet. “Classified,” he barks, picking up random loose leaves that would be hell to put back together in order, and finally hands one folder to Harry.

Harry hesitates before taking it. “But the Middle East is not your area.”

Merlin snorts. “I’m not the only handler around here, believe it or not.”

“Why can’t we send Percival?” Harry sullenly sets the folder aside. “His Arabic is better than mine.”

“Because, unlike some, Percival is actually fit for active duty, and will be assigned accordingly. You are going.”

“Like hell I will,” Harry juts out his chin in an expression that is usually reserved for talking to his mother, but Merlin somehow learned to bring out his inner five-year-old with ruthless efficiency. “What, you’ll ship me off, and I will miss all the fun here?”

“What’s fun around here anyway?” Merlin tilts his head to the side, clearly amused with the scene.

“For one, there’s this omega rights rally that I’m going to tomorrow,” Harry says, “care to join me?”

Merlin tenses immediately, perched uncomfortably at the edge of his seat, still clutching reports and mission debriefs to his chest like a lifeline. The armful of creased and crumpled depictions of the ways in which one human being can hurt another is stuck between them, and Merlin tightens his grip, papers and folders rustling like dry bones.

“I see,” he finally says, a mask of studied impassivity on his face. “That does indeed sound quite fun. Don your progressive hat once a year, rub your family’s noses in what a rebel you are, doff it by the end of the day. Good clean fun, pretty cheap too, as entertainment goes.”

“I do care, you know,” Harry says, kicking a swivel chair away from a desk and plopping down on it, suddenly bone-weary. “I do.”

“Yes, the way someone who has no stakes in the game does,” Merlin says, and, before Harry has time to interject, adds, “I know it’s not your fault. I still cannot help resenting you for it.”

“But I do have stakes in the game, don’t you see?” Harry says, leaning in close, breathing in Merlin’s smell hungrily, like a drowning man. “I care about you, so I care about this, even if sometimes you insist on being difficult,” he finishes petulantly.

“Oi, don’t get your snot all over my sweater,” Merlin says in amused horror, waving him away. Harry retreats complacently, relieved that Merlin has his foot on the brake, disappointed that he does.

The next morning, he dreams of the distant patter of a machine gun, regular, almost soothing in the way death often is when it passes you by without looking too close; in the no man’s land between sleep and waking, he coughs, breathing in the red roiling sand of dreams, and wakes up, his ribs aching. The noise, however, does not stop, and he rushes over to the door.

“Great,” Merlin says, his knuckles red from knocking, “I was afraid you’d already left. I’m seconding you to a friend for the rally.”

“The next time you need to wake me up, I suggest you start with a kiss. I will leave the door open,” Harry says through a yawn, rubbing at his eyes. Merlin ignores him. 

“He’s been attending rallies of dubious legal status when you were still in your nappies, so you’ll be safe with him.”

That finally pushes Harry over into awake alertness. “Wait, are you worried about my safety?”

“I’m your handler, it’s in the job description,” Merlin says with a certain degree of wounded pride. “You might be a wondrous killing machine wrapped in an attractive meat suit, but rallies are not your element, while they are his. Remember I told you about a friend who started this Omega Rights are Human Rights organization?”

“Wait, you mean the Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing do-gooder?”

“That’s the one,” Merlin nods seriously, seemingly without noticing any contradictions in his understanding of the situation. “I just need to tell you two things- god, this is embarrassing. May I come in?”

His curiosity piqued, Harry finally steps aside, letting Merlin through, and raises an eyebrow. Merlin crosses his arms over his chest and, without looking at Harry, informs him in a flat, toneless voice, “First, he thinks that I work for an NGO that provides humanitarian assistance to refugees. I would greatly appreciate it if you did not disabuse him of the notion.”

The idea of Merlin handing out lollipops to skittish children makes Harry cackle with glee at the incongruity of it. And from what little Harry remembers of Merlin from when the man first joined Kingsman as a new recruit – a lanky shadow slinking around the hallways, tall as a beanstalk and skinny as a rake, with a mop of perpetually unruly hair that defied both the laws of physics and any attempts at disciplining – he could use a lollipop himself. Harry pats Merlin on the shoulder. “Did you also tell him that you pick up stray kittens?”

“I was young,” Merlin huffs. “I wanted him to know that I’m doing something worthy with my life, and that sounded better than a tailor shop.”

“Fine, Mother Theresa, I will take your secret to the grave. And the second thing?”

Merlin hesitates for a moment before blurting out, “Merlin is my real name. It was the 60s, my ma lived in a caravan, alright?”

Those two revelations have Harry chuckling the whole way down to Highbury Fields, where the rally is to take place. As Harry leaves a Kingsman car on the corner of Highbury Grove and Baalbec, their agreed meeting spot, he’s almost hit by a bus that bears an advert “Vote, or omegas will.”

“The fuckers,” says an apathetic voice from behind his shoulder, and then adds much more cheerfully. “Hello, Merlin’s friend.”

As he spins around on his heels, Harry realizes that he somehow expected Merlin’s friend to be a carbon copy of Merlin, and he’s equal parts relieved and disconcerted when he actually sees the man. Noel Butler, whom Merlin tasked with protecting Harry, is a pipsqueak of a man; the top of his head barely reaches Harry’s shoulder. Where Merlin – Harry smiles inwardly yet again at the impossible fact that that is both his name and his title – could pass for a beta, if not for an alpha at a distance, Butler screams omega. Harry sizes him up professionally: mid-40s or thereabouts, judging by the deep laugh lines around his eyes, and poised on the verge between greying and grey. The man is scrawny, drowning in his pastel gabardine trench coat, and unconcerned with his status as a lightweight: his check scarf is slung around his neck in a careless reverse drape that would make it so easy to catch the loose ends and pull until he choked, if one were so inclined. Harry stretches his lips into a polite, if not altogether cordial smile.

Butler’s handshake is unexpectedly firm though. “So, how do you know Merlin?” Harry asks as they start towards an open green space already teeming with people.

“Oh, we go way back,” the man says with an easy laugh, somehow making clear that that’s the end of it.

Harry tries not to stare; he’s never seen this many omegas in one place in his life. There are groups of teenagers sprawling on blankets and sipping their beers, and older omegas, some of them dragging children around, and he can even see at least one octogenarian with a walker.

Nodding at the drinking teenagers, Butler frowns. “We should have had the dry law. This smells like trouble.”

And soon enough, trouble finds them. Surprisingly, despite Harry’s honed instincts, Butler is the first to notice it. He briefly nods at Harry, and with a quick “Stay back, they wouldn’t care much for an alpha. Catch you later!” breaks into a brisk jog.

At the far end of the field, a throng of about thirty young men in their late teens, decked out in their Sunday best tracksuits and trainers, are circling around a group of visibly tense policemen. At the distance, Harry cannot quite hear what they are chanting, but he can make an educated guess. One of them lights a small firecracker and lazily, with relish throws it at the policemen. Fortunately, it lands far enough from their feet, and produces more smoke than anything else on explosion. That is when Butler reaches the scene.

Harry stands out enough as an unaccompanied alpha as is, so he tries not to stare lest he look even more like a plainclothes officer than he already does. He circles around the green space, picks up a Ω-shaped pretzel at a pretzel stand, lets a volunteer who shamelessly flirts with him pin an Omegas and Allies against Violence badge to his lapel. He notices an Omega Rights are Human Rights tent by the road, and spends some time leafing through their fliers advertising microloans and evening business management classes. Only rarely, having made sure that he himself is not attracting any untoward attention, does he dare to look up at the scene playing out at the far end of the field. At intervals, as if in a time lapse video, Harry watches, with fascination and mounting respect, as Butler positions himself between the teenagers and the policemen; his back blithely turned to the police, he talks to the teenagers, obviously unruffled by their jeers. He remains friendly and unperturbed, like a Great Dane accosted by an irritable Toy Poodle, occasionally chuckling either at his own jokes or at things the teenagers say. It takes him a better part of an hour, but the group finally retreats. Harry watches Butler shake the policemen’s hands, obviously apologizing. 

“Are you sure none of those upstanding citizens are card-holding members of the Omega Liberation Front?” he says, catching up with Butler.

“Do I look like I care?” Butler asks, lifting his gaze at Harry. Only now does Harry notice that his shoulders sag in exhaustion, and that the dark shadows under his eyes seem to have deepened. With a sigh, the man continues. “With the current witch hunt, some of them have been recently laid off work. Others have no prospects of employment whatsoever. There’s talk of the NHS reform that could push some of them off the free heat suppressants. If I can talk them down and make sure that they will stay out of the nick at least for the afternoon, I damn well shall, without asking for their credentials.”

Harry freezes, putting the pieces together. He always took Merlin for granted, but now he can all too vividly imagine all the could-have-beens of a young man who grew up in a caravan with the sort of mother who would call her child Merlin. He starts to apologize, but Butler shuts him up.

“Just tell me- is Merlin safe? The witch hunt has not reached your workplace?”

“God no,” Harry shivers theatrically. “Besides, nobody would want Merlin on the loose.”

“True, that.” They lean close in companionable silence, amused at the mental images which they obviously share. After a pause, Butler cautiously asks, “It’s not a charity, that organization that he’s working at, is it?”

Harry chuckles. “Not as such, no.”

Butler raises a palm, silencing him. “Obviously, whatever it is, he did not want me to know. So I will not ask. Just take care of him, alright?” 

Butler briefly squeezes Harry’s hand, looking him into the eyes. For a second, Harry stares at him uncomprehendingly, and then it dawns on him. He quickly pulls down his scarf, showing the clear skin on his neck, not marked by a mating scar.

“It’s not like that,” Harry mumbles, mortified and proud in equal measures. “We are not like that.”

“Not prying, but please do, will you? He’s a good lad, awfully young in many ways, but he does have a heart several sizes too big for his chest, and he’s not taking this whole Omega Liberation thing at all well.”

Merlin would not say two words about the business to Harry, but, apparently, he had friends he would and did discuss the matter with. This hurts more than Merlin’s reticence, or the new and startling discovery that he’s not as thick-skinned as he would like to make himself out to be.

“Are you investigating this?” Harry asks, before he can think better of it.

However, Butler offers more of an answer than Harry expected. “Not as such,” the man says with an amused smirk, echoing Harry’s words.

“Do you have the files on Lee Unwin?” Harry asks, coming to a decision, and notes that Butler does not ask who that is. “Merlin’s too straight an arrow to steal the classified documents, but guess what, I’m not. I can bring them to you, if you wish. Merlin thinks the man might be in trouble.”

Butler hesitates for a moment, and finally says, “I’m meeting a friend earlier this afternoon, but you can drop by after eight.”

The autumn chill is already setting in, but it is not punishing yet, merely nipping at Harry’s fingers like a playful puppy; and the sun is so bright Harry thinks it has not yet been informed of the approaching dull ache of winter. He decides against taking the Kingman subway, and takes a train to the nearby village instead, to enjoy what might be the last leisurely walk of the season.

The early dank dusk is already crawling out of its nooks and crannies and setting in for good by the time Harry reaches a slip of a forest right before the Kingsman estate. He wraps his scarf tighter around his neck against the chill when he hears a sudden crackle of footsteps from a smaller footpath that runs through the dense undergrowth parallel to the main road. He stops, holds his breath to make sure that his hearing is not playing tricks on him. Everybody on the estate has been joking about their respective paranoias, but Harry’d rather be a live paranoid fool than a dead trusting idiot. He lunges into the undergrowth. On the other side of it, he is greeted by a barrel of a Kingsman pistol.

“Oh, it’s you,” he grins at Merlin, putting his own Glock back into its holster, and then he notices that something is wrong.

For one, there’s not a trace of Merlin’s usual confidence in his posture.

“Stay back,” Merlin rasps, gesturing with his gun before finally putting it away too.

Harry makes a tiniest hand gesture, imperceptible to untrained observers, the Kingsman agreed code for “Is there a threat that I cannot see?” Merlin lets out a thin laugh and shakes his head. “God, no. Just- don’t come too close, okay?”

Harry obeys, because he’s used to obeying Merlin, even if he’d rather he didn’t. Fear is rising inside him, and directionless protective anger. As they start towards the manor, Harry notices a slight limp in Merlin’s gait, and when they walk into a clearing and uncertain dusk light washes over Merlin’s face, Harry’s struck by an ugly bruise forming on his scraped cheekbone.

Noticing that Harry’s staring, Merlin looks away quickly. Harry clenches his fists. While he was wandering about, his Merlin got hurt. He tries to sniff out the hurt, but Merlin resolutely stays upwind, so he has no choice but to ask, not knowing if he’s ready for all possible answers. “You know you can tell me anything.”

Merlin chuckles, a thin, sad sound. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Anyway, you should see the other guy.”

Harry wants to shake him, or cling to him, and not let go of him until everything is painless and safe, but he does not have a choice but to obey when Merlin heads for his office, barking at Harry to stay back as he tries to trail after him. Harry rubs at his eyes and checks his watch. He has barely enough time to sneak Unwin’s dossier out of the archives and get back to London in time.

Butler lives on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse. Taking two steps at a time, restless with worry and anger at himself, and at the world at large, and at Merlin for his damn stubborn silences and for letting himself get hurt, Harry rings the doorbell before he notices that the door is slightly open.

“Butler?” he asks cautiously, but there’s not a whisper from the flat. Drawing his Glock, Harry kicks the door open and spins around, making sure that the space is clear. The bathroom is dark, and he almost dares someone to be there as he searches for the switch one-handed, aiming into the empty space with the other hand, but no one’s there. He barges into the bedroom, surprisingly austere, and punches at the door of a walk-in closet, demanding a let-out for the rage eating him up inside. When he reaches the drawing room, he sees a sniper rifle drawn into the letter omega graffitied on the wall before he sees the body. He wipes at his brow with the back of the palm holding the Glock, and quietly pads back to lock the door. Back in the drawing room, he goes down on his knees and tries not to stare at the mess of the white shards of the skull, brain and blood where Butler’s head used to be.

Hoping that none of the neighbours have called the police yet, he quickly takes note of all the potentially relevant details. There are two wine glasses, one tumbled to the floor, wine soaking into a lush carpet, and the other untouched on the table. “I’m meeting a friend earlier this afternoon,” Butler said. “Ask me if I care if they are in the Omega Liberation Front, as long as I can help them in the short term,” Butler said. He trusted his killer enough to have let him in and to have offered him drinks. Harry knew the man for all of two hours, and he’s no stranger to sudden and ugly deaths, and yet he cannot help but mourn him, this laughing believer in civility stuck in the times that responded best to violence. Something twists cruelly in Harry’s chest when he realizes that it would by necessity fall to him to tell Merlin about his friend’s death.

He bends over the body, slipping into his trained professional mode to note the bruised knuckles and half-formed bruises on Butler’s arms. Interesting; the killer could have just shot him, and eventually did, but not before they got into a fight. Did the killer hesitate for a second, giving Butler, a careless lightweight intellectual, a brief and futile hope of an escape?

Harry finally steels himself and looks closer at the mess remaining of the man’s head. There’s so much blood that he assumes there must be an exit wound. He cautiously walks around the body towards the other side of the room, and peers at the oak wood paneling, and soon enough finds the bullet mark. The bullet is lodged in the wood about half an inch deep. Harry does not have tweezers, so he pokes and prods at the bullet with his pen to dislodge it. It takes several minutes of careful maneuvering, but eventually it drops to his outstretched palm.

Partly obliterated by the collision but still perfectly recognizable, there’s a K drawn into a circle on the bullet. Harry tightens his fist around it, presses his forehead to the cool paneling to still his racing thoughts as pieces of the jigsaw puzzle start to snap into place around him.

“You should see the other guy,” Merlin said. Clearly, he did not expect that Harry would.


	6. Chapter 6

Harry allows himself a moment of weakness; he is entitled to one, he is, he thinks angrily, his fists clenched so tight that his fingernails are leaving deep angry grooves on his palms. The answer has been under his nose this whole time, and yet he did not see it, or did not want to. Merlin never made a secret of his understanding of such organizations, flaunting uncanny knowledge of what would push men from the military to defect, or which at-risk youth helplines he would approach had he been recruiting. Except that there was nothing conditional about that clause, was there? Merlin’s joy in explosives was public knowledge; when he told Harry to leave the mined barracks, Harry never questioned his source of information. A tip-off was just one possible source, while belonging to an organization that planted the explosives was another, and equally plausible. Merlin’s sudden caginess, as well as his eagerness to ship Harry off to Kuwait suddenly made sense. Harry almost groans with grief, and defeat, and breathtaking tenderness that hurts like a punch to the gut: of course, the bastard knew that he was an open book to Harry. Arthur, or Percival, or Lancelot, or all the rest of them, really, would never notice, but Harry would, so he had to get Harry out of the way. Harry’s furious, choking on anger like bile, that Merlin let him worry today, slinking away, not letting Harry smell gunpowder on him, and the blood that was not his. But he cannot bring himself to be angry at Merlin for joining the Omega Liberation Front in the first place. Maybe he would have too, had he been in Merlin’s shoes, and Harry blesses all the gods that he does not believe in for the fact that he is not. He does not want to, and would not, since he lacks any experience with it, imagine a life in which he could be treated as inferior, or at least indelibly other, by all that mattered to him, even by those that should have known better.

He casts a quick glance back at the dead body behind him, wonders briefly, incoherent with overwhelming grief, how that came about. Did Merlin come here intending to kill? Or did he come as a friend, and was left no other choice when he realized that Butler knew his secret? What was it that Butler said? “Merlin’s not taking this whole Omega Liberation thing at all well,” was it? That could conceivably mean that he knew about the extent of Merlin’s involvement, and still, he asked Harry to look out for Merlin, begged almost.

When it comes down to it, it’s no choice at all, not really. Harry reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and fishes out the bullet that Merlin saved him from. There’s nothing that he can do for Butler, not anymore, but he can grant his last wish, such as it was, which the man did not know yet was his last. Careful not to look at the Omega Liberation Front graffiti marring the wall, he dips the bullet into the mess of the man’s skull, and shoves it into the bullet hole in the paneling. That would not confuse the forensics experts, of course, but at least Harry can destroy the tangible link to Kingsman, exchanging the bullet Merlin saved him from for the bullet that would doom Merlin. Hoping that Merlin had enough presence of mind to wipe his fingerprints, Harry carefully backtracks out of the flat, throws the Kingsman bullet into the Thames, and walks off without watching it fall.

*

When Harry opens the door to his room at the Kingsman estate, dead on his feet, wishing only for merciful sleep that would let him forget about the whole mess, at least for a while, he immediately knows that something is wrong.

The room is dark, but the curtains are billowing around the open window. He never leaves his windows open. The Glock is in his hand before he has time to think.

There’s a quiet whine of a chuckle, and then Merlin says, in a tense, carefully controlled voice, “You are making a tradition of greeting me like this, aren’t you?”

He cannot let Merlin know that he figured out his secret, Harry thinks desperately, swinging the door shut and turning on the lights.

“I don’t remember offering you a key,” he says more briskly than he should have, just to win himself time.

“Desperate times-”

And before Merlin finishes speaking, it hits Harry like a wave, knocking breath out of him, and he is left reeling, gasping, choking on the smell of omega in heat, not dulled down by the suppressants.

Instinctively, he takes a step back, as if there’s any escaping it, scrabbles helplessly at the wall behind him. “Didn’t you have one recently?” he mumbles, as if that changes anything.

“Slipping me heat inducers was someone’s idea of fun.” Merlin bares his teeth, and for a moment, there’s nothing of his usual mild-mannered self in that mask, just a hurt desperate animal backed into a corner.

Right. If some earlier incidents are any indication, that does sound like something that some agents would do, Harry thinks frantically to stave off the undercurrent of desire and rage pulling him under, but at the moment, he cannot discount the possibility that Merlin took the inducers himself, so that Harry would not be able to testify against him, should it ever come to that. As if Harry ever could. He imagines Merlin downing the pills, heaving as his biology rewrites itself, whining with the need he would rather not have to cope with. Harry lets out a hoarse laugh.

“Aren’t they illegal?” He rasps, biding time.

“You cannot get them over the counter, but what does it change?” Merlin gets up in one languid movement, and takes a step towards him.

“Don’t,” Harry raises his palms helplessly, feeling his resolve melt into nonexistence.

“You offered,” Merlin says suspiciously. “I’d rather it were you. Hell, I’d rather it never came to this, but if I chose to do it, you know I’d always choose you.”

And Harry knows, always knew, light-headed with exhaustion and the smell that whispers things to the irrational hungry being that he is, once you strip off everything that is consciously _him_. Unthinking, he reaches for Merlin, for the thing that was Merlin part-time, he corrects himself, and is now slowly slipping into the incoherent sweaty being that is just cravings and an emptiness that needs to be filled, that Harry can mount, and rut against, and plough into, and spill all over, punching in, swelling inside, breeding, recasting it to the shape of his body.

With the last dregs of his will and consciousness, he takes a step back.

“Please,” Merlin says, and covers the space between them.

Merlin clutches at his hand, his bony fingers cold and clammy with sweat. His grasp is tight and desperate, as if he were hanging over an abyss with Harry as his only chance of survival. Guiltily, Harry allows himself to steal this moment, Merlin’s pulse frantic under his fingers, the smell of his slick cloying in Harry’s nostrils. And another second. He knows that if he stays for a moment longer, all choices will be ripped out of his hands, and what is bound to happen will take its course.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin whispers against his neck, over his arteries, over the patch of skin he would sink his teeth into when mating, death lurking a step away from life. “I’m really sorry, you know I love-”

Harry breaks out of his grip, blindly claws at the door, and runs. He’s finally angry now, at Merlin for being what he is, and for having made the choices that he did, and for banking on Harry’s one weakness as an alpha, and on his one weakness as Harry. There’s no pain yet, but he knows that it will come. He lost his Merlin, a word that covers the space that he does not know how to map otherwise, his friend, his love, the man he trusted with his life, and would again, if not for this.

He bangs on Arthur’s door, scraping his knuckles raw, until the man opens.

“I hate the weather,” he blurts out, before he has time for second thoughts. “I hear Kuwait is lovely this time of year. I can leave immediately, if you want me to.”


	7. Chapter 7

The weather in Kuwait does not suit Harry any better. Afternoons are sweltering, and then night drops like a curtain on a play that the audience walked out on, guilty and swift, bringing a piercing chill with it. Kuwait has one undeniable upside though: it is far from England. His fear and guilt are lost between time zones, smudged like phone numbers drunkenly scrawled on sweaty skin, or sinking to the deep like skittish trout; Harry does not let himself think about Merlin, or at least does not let himself think about Merlin too often.

“There will be war,” he smugly informs Lancelot, his handler for the job. “You can call me Cassandra.”

He waits for a familiar chuckle that does not come, bites on his knuckle to stifle a surge of longing and regret. He tries to not hold the fact that he’s not Merlin against Lancelot, and sometimes he even succeeds.

“There are always wars, if you just care to wait long enough,” the old man grumbles through a cough. “You’ll need to do better than that. We need dates, directions, numbers, if you please.”

When he is not sifting through reports from the contested oil fields or drawing up schemes for organizing a resistance movement in case of an almost inevitable occupation, with a network of safe houses and weapons drops through third countries, Harry proceeds to fuck his way through most of the Reuters contingent on the ground. He is enthusiastic with gratitude, pressing against and into the undemanding beta smell that would not twist his mind into a keening horrified thing. Perfecting as they are the harried look of grave concern, the journalists seem to be amused by Harry’s dogged buoyancy. Besides, unlike certain others at the office, he has the courtesy not to pretend that he is not a spy, which immediately ingratiates him to a significant portion of the crew, and he is happy to trade contacts and tidbits of information with them.

A month quietly turns into two. Harry develops a list of favourite haunts with smuggled booze, and a friendship with Lancelot that, frankly, takes him by surprise. During long nights poring over the latest satellite pictures that might prove the movement of Iraqi troops, Lancelot stuck in a dank British autumn and Harry cruising through bars at international hotels, the older agent occasionally divulges stories about his childhood in Egypt or colourful pieces of local folklore. 

It’s his longest assignment to date, and by the end of it, Harry has spent more time in Kuwait than he has lived continuously at his Kingsman-issue London house. He spends the flight back thoroughly medicating himself with all the whiskey he can find on the jet, and slinks back to his London house until further notice before anybody has a chance to see him.

Turns out he should not have worried. Even when Harry is periodically summoned back to the Kingsman manor for debriefings and reports on matters that were deemed too confidential to discuss even through their encrypted connection, he only ever sees Merlin at a distance. Harry drops all pretense of good manners and stares at his neck like one would stare at a festering wound. Merlin was occasionally known to disdain the custom to cover the neck, shared by both alphas and omegas, in order to flaunt the clear skin unmarked by a mating scar, but these days Harry only ever sees him in high neck sweaters. It does not mean anything, it’s autumn, after all, or at least it shouldn’t matter to him, Harry knows, and yet he cannot help staring. At least Merlin is alive, and safe, so he must be as good at hiding his crimes as he is at hiding his scars.

Harry craves a mission, the clarity of relinquishing his choices, the exuberance of having a purpose, the easy violence of it, yet none come for a while. He even picks up Mr Pickles from his sister’s, and takes long walks with him. 

When Gawain summons him for a briefing, Harry is almost ready to kiss the man, even if they do not usually see eye to eye on most issues. Gawain is on domestic matters, so Harry should not be all that surprised when he brings up the Omega Liberation Front, yet something twists in his chest regardless, something scared and lost.

“You’ve already been to an omega rally, haven’t you?” Gawain drawls, biting on a temple of his glasses as he sprawls boneless in his chair. “Oh, do drop the sour look, we are all spies here, nothing escapes the rumour mill. My point is, you would not look too out of place at one, and the police already has your pictures from that earlier one, I’m sure.” 

Harry runs through the options. Despite his obvious expertise, Merlin is not on the case, which could mean that he is suspect, if not a suspect in any particular investigation yet. On the other hand, it could also mean that he is busy with an ongoing case that he cannot be pulled off at a moment’s notice. Cautiously, he asks, “Weren’t we pulled off this one earlier?”

“It is one of those ‘wanted dead or alive’ type situations.” 

“I see. And they don’t want the ‘dead’ part on their hands,” Harry muses.

“Not particularly,” Gawain grins. “Not with the elections looming. Crap, I’ve been stuck in the office since before dawn, would you believe it? Let’s go take a walk.”

Ice rustles under their feet as they walk over the lawn. Gawain knocks a cigarette out of his pack and lights up, puffs out the first whiff of smoke luxuriously. “There are reasons to believe,” he breathes out, words punctuated by puffs, “that there will be an explosion at the rally. The territory would be searched beforehand, of course, so whatever they have, they’ll have to bring it in. At present, most omegas probably wouldn’t be caught dead at a rally like that, so the crowd shouldn’t be too bad. Prevent the attack if you can, don’t mess with the police if they are handling it, take over if they don’t.”

“I wonder when we went from being the modern knights to being hitmen for hire,” Harry starts, and feels his voice drop to barely more than a whisper as he catches movement on the driveway.

Arthur is walking towards the manor at a brisk pace, and Merlin follows half a step behind him in mincing steps, tightly hugging himself against the cold. As they are almost at the steps, Arthur turns on him and says something with a scowl, and Merlin cowers under his stare. With a satisfied smirk, Arthur reaches out and slides his palm under the neck of Merlin’s sweater in a possessive, almost indecent gesture. Merlin stills under the touch, and then obediently leans into it. 

Harry freezes. It makes sense, of course, now that he allows himself to think about it. If it’s at all possible, Arthur can cushion Merlin against the fall, save him from his own solitary rage. But this, this deference Harry witnesses, is not the Merlin that he knows or loves.

“We are all shocked that he pulled that on you,” Gawain says with barely disguised malicious joy, having followed the direction of Harry’s gaze. “I’m so sorry, pal. Everybody assumed you two would mate, but that’s omegas for you, rolling over for the most superior alpha. Cannot trust them.”

It’s not like that, and Merlin’s not like that, Harry wants to say, but he cannot explain in what way Merlin is different, can he now? So he settles on punching Gawain out as the next best thing.


	8. Chapter 8

“On position,” he whispers into the speaker in his collar. One of the constables gathering around the perimeter of the park, not the brightest crayon in the box, obviously, gives Harry a friendly nod, and Harry walks on without acknowledging it. He hopes nobody else saw it, not that he has any chance of blending in as is.

He cannot help looking around his shoulder, hoping to see the man who is not there. Harry notes belatedly that he felt a damned sight more secure at the last rally, in the presence of Butler, stubborn and laughing and confident, making up in sheer dogged determination for what he lacked in stature. Harry almost laughs at the absurdity of it: him, a trained agent and an alpha, relying on an omega who likely never wielded anything heftier than a pen for comfort. Butler would probably have found it funny too, had he not been dead.

That thought brings Harry to a crashing standstill. Scanning the crowd around him, he gasps for air, and then briefly squeezes his eyes shut, trying to compose himself.

“Seen anything?” Gawain immediately chimes in in his ear. The man is sharper, Harry realizes, than anybody with his level of egotism has any right to be, and more dangerous than Harry previously estimated.

“Negative,” he murmurs distractedly, trying to gather up as much confidence as he can muster under the circumstances, and walks on.

Arthur would never send him on a mission that Harry was all but guaranteed to fail, would he? Harry thinks frantically, grasping at straws. But then, for all Arthur’s ruthless efficiency, the man had a flair for high Shakespearean drama, delivered in the same tight-lipped, restrained manner as orders to kill. Of course he had, or else he would have ended up in MI6 rather than in Kingsman. Nobody in their right mind would send Harry against Merlin, but none of them were in their right minds to begin with, were they?

Harry wipes his palms on his trousers, tries to swallow, but his throat is parched. To drown out the panic, he catalogues his surroundings. If the earlier rally could be mistaken for a family picnic or an arts and crafts club outing, that is, if you did not pay any mind to what was boiling around the edges, nobody could make the same mistake about this one. Quietly cursing the chilly weather and all the puffy coats it brought, Harry tries, and fails, to gauge the arsenal concealed on those around him. The crowd is indeed rather thin, and the earlier levity of floating chatting groups is nowhere to be seen; in its stead, there’s the purposeful gait of determined young men, their brows knit in concentration, that weave in and out of the crowd. Some meet Harry’s gaze and linger for a moment too long. Harry immediately pegs several for plainclothes officers, while others must be local omega patrols, torn between keeping the peace and spoiling for a fight. At least none of them are Merlin; Harry’s hesitant to trust the surge of relief washing over him.

The worst thing is, Harry cannot deny the idea a certain poetic justice. Rumour has it that their Arthur, still Gaheris at the time, is the one who introduced the dog test to begin with; he entertains a sickly distant curiousity about his knights, and the minds of men in general, that belies his belonging to the group. With each passing moment, Harry’s certainty that Arthur could, and, indeed, would send Harry, and nobody but, to stop Merlin grows. The elegant simplicity of the solution is almost tempting, and by the end of his first round around the crowd Harry is grieving for Merlin whom he already lost once, and could lose again, this time without the chance of redress. He takes care to steady his breathing to a slow and even pace; Harry always suspected that his imagination was too vivid, unbefitting an agent.

Distraught, Harry distantly notes how his concentration slips, but can do nothing about it. He knows what he should be looking for, men faking nonchalance, men coming too close to places where one could conceal an explosive device, men falling out of the choreography of the crowd. Ideally, he should not even look at faces to avoid attracting attention, postures should suffice for his purposes, and yet he searches, and fears to find, a familiar face.

His gaze slips right over the young man at first. Harry turns to walk back before a vague memory propels him to spin on his heels more briskly than he should have, attracting several suspicious looks. He frowns, trying to match the name to the face, mentally carding through dossiers and reports, but he cannot quite place it. Young agents are told to trust their gut feeling, the difference between life and death often lurking in a split second when the body reacts before the mind regains the clarity necessary to rationally process the signs. Harry, however, would no longer place himself among young agents, and he knows that his mind, driven into hyper-alertness on a mission, would occasionally play tricks on him, noticing similarities and patters where there are none. Maybe he should let go, he thinks, and then clenches his fists in a sudden realization.

The man he is staring at is one Lee Unwin, presumed dead by all including his friends, although not by Merlin. Noticing Harry’s unwavering stare, the man turns swiftly to the side, waves at someone at the far edge of the park and starts in that direction. Harry’s fairly sure that the man feigned seeing an acquaintance just to evade an alpha stranger who was paying him too much attention; or, more likely, because he had things to hide.

“Visual on Unwin,” he says clearly into the speaker, trailing Unwin at a distance. 

Gawain’s silent for a while, and then incredulously asks, “Our dead mole in the Omega Liberation Front?”

Before Harry has time to answer, the connection crackles, and Merlin’s snide voice cuts in, “For a very broad definition of ‘our.’ And a very broad definition of ‘dead.’”

“Merlin, the fuck-” Gawain yelps as Harry breathes a sigh of relief: whatever might come down the road, at least Merlin is safely back at his office, fiddling with the controls and driving everybody else up the walls, gloriously, outrageously alive. Moreover, this is _his_ Merlin, sarcastic, insufferable and sharp, not a shadow he saw earlier.

“Gawain, I’m cutting your mic. The indignation of dealing with the incompetent classes hurts.” That’s Arthur’s turn of phrase, delivered in a perfect imitation of Arthur’s intonations, Harry notes, swallowing hard through a lump in his throat. “Harry, get out.”

“Lee Unwin is here,” Harry repeats through clenched teeth.

While Merlin is not in his line of fire for now, his decision to cut the mission short right when Harry set his eyes on the suspect does not look good, Harry thinks desperately, following the man to the edge of the gathering where the crowd is thinning.

“Yes, and he’s the least of your worries,” Merlin snaps. “Where exactly are you?”

Unwin disappears behind a huddled group of not quite respectable young men, and Harry breaks into a jog to catch up with him before it’s too late.

“Oi, where you think you are going?” A man is his fifties, missing an upper incisor, grabs Harry by the elbow and breathes a heavy beer smell into his face. “That chap there does not want your company, and if you think you knots can just-”

Harry can smell fear on the man, years of it. The man winces minutely even as his chest puffs out in pride. Maybe it’s his first time standing up for someone else when he usually does not have the courage to stand up even for himself, Harry thinks with regret, and that at the utterly wrong moment. Harry looks around desperately. The men around them are perking up, attracted by the spectacle. The option leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but Unwin is out of his sight, getting farther away with each passing second, and he does not have any other choice. He waves a constable over.

“Fuckers,” the man spits, a yellow blob hitting Harry’s shoe, “all you good for, chase down a fella, stick it in, and the coppers will cover up for you, that what you think?”

“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” The constable asks, carefully approaching them. It’s the same dimwit who nodded at Harry earlier.

“Harry, do you hear me? You really have to get out now,” Merlin snaps in his earpiece, his voice thick with barely contained anxiety. “Unlike you, I actually listen to the chatter on the police waves.”

Harry winces, jerking his elbow out of the man’s grip. The moment the man turns on the constable, Harry runs, praying in vain that nobody follows.

Unwin’s fast, but inexperienced in ditching a tail. Had he turned to the side, zigzagged around a bit, ditched his bright yellow blazer, Harry would not have stood a chance, but the man jogs purposefully ahead, seemingly unperturbed. Harry picks up pace, noting the chase in his peripheral vision, the sounds of a brawl behind him. Packs of men, like packs of smaller predators, chase him because he runs, and because they’ve been spoiling for a fight for far too long. Breathing steadily through his nose, Harry waves at the line of constables Unwin has to walk past, hoping that they will get his meaning. 

Indeed, several men in blue start moving towards them, but, with the last desperate surge of speed, he’s the first to reach Unwin. Harry clamps an iron grip on his shoulder and punches him in the solar plexus in the same moment, giving the punch all he has. While the man gasps for breath, Harry pats him down for explosives. Unwin is thin, almost painfully so, chest heaving weakly under Harry’s palms, and there’s nothing suspicious on him, unless- Harry’s about ready to reach for the man’s shoes, willing to risk a kick to the teeth in the name of not going up in the air, when the man goes limp in his grip, slowly sagging to the ground.

That’s omegas for you, swooning damsels every last one of them, he thinks darkly, mirroring Gawain’s phrase, and then cringes with a spike of guilt as he thinks of Merlin. He lifts his gaze, and his eyes fly wide open as he stares up into a neat bullet hole smack in the center of Unwin’s forehead.

Harry looks around frantically. Despite his well-trained hearing, Harry has not heard a thing, and guns, even with a silencer, are far from silent. He casts a glance over the row of Georgian townhouses at the farther side of the park. They are lined with a row of trees, but with any luck, one could get a clear enough shot from the upper floors.

“Harry, there’s a Kingsman cab on the corner of-” Merlin’s voice rings raw in his ear right as someone to his side yelps “The knot killed him.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Harry huffs, raising his arms with open palms, “I don’t even have a-”

And that’s when the blue wave of cops descends on them. As they try to push the throng further away from what is now a crime scene, Harry slips past their line and sets off for the row of houses. Of course, the sniper will be off before he reaches them, but maybe there would be clues, anything-

“And where do you think you are going?” a middle-aged beta DCI asks, barring his way. “Wait, Harry Hart, is it? Long time no see. I’ve been searching all over for two months now.”

The first punch knocks the earpiece off Harry’s ear, scraping the skin raw, before he has a chance to produce his Kingsman-issue clearance. So much for smooth inter-departmental cooperation, Harry thinks, and, without bothering to right himself, jabs up at the DCI’s jaw. He is rewarded by the satisfying crunch of crumbling teeth when a constable to his right throws a mean hook, and Harry feels his lip break upon his tooth. His ears ringing with rage and joy of a fight, he swings out blindly, and his fist connects with the man’s nose in a sickening wet crack. His day suddenly got so much more fun.

Harry veers on the closest constable with an uppercut, and, as that one sways back clutching at his bleeding nose, swirls around, raising his arms back up protectively. As Harry ducks to avoid a police baton aimed at his head, someone takes a well-measured swipe at the foot his weight is on, and he goes to the ground. They are upon him before he has time to roll over and hit back, pressing him face-down into the muddy ground.

“Harry Hart,” the name punctuated by a kick to his ribs, “you are under arrest for the murder of Noel Butler.”


	9. Chapter 9

“I don’t see how this is relevant,” Harry regales a hassled DCI with an amused smirk over the table covered in photographs from Butler’s flat. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the gent’s.”

Ignoring his request, the DCI rubs at his eyes and takes another sip of thin coffee from a chipped and grubby mug. “You are a reasonable young man,” he says with a sigh. “You stand to inherit a peerage.”

Harry shakes his head vigorously. “That’s my elder sister. She’ll do a much better job of it too, if you ask me.”

“An alpha too, I see.” 

Harry lets his sense of humour get the better of him. He knows better than to joke around men who hold the keys to his handcuffs, but the cavalry is coming to his rescue any minute now, so he lets his expression slide into a perplexed frown and drawls, “Of course she is. We drown all the newborn omegas, don’t you know?”

For a moment, it seems like the DCI really, truly did believe him, but then his face contorts into a strained smile, and he snaps, “But if anything were to happen to her-”

“I’m certain that you wouldn’t want to use any phrases that can be construed as a threat,” Harry smiles courteously, cutting him short. “Now, if you could arrange to get me to the gent’s-”

The DCI raises his open palms in a placating gesture. “Far be it from me to offend you, or your family, in that manner. Let’s start over, why don’t we. What were you doing at Noel Butler’s flat?”

He slides a sheaf of pictures across the table, and Harry does not even bother looking at them this time. He casts a quick glance at the clock above the door: they’ve been at it for close to two hours already, so Kingsman will get him out any minute now. He indifferently nudges at the photographs with his handcuffed wrists. There’s footage from the rally, Harry and Butler leaning close, engrossed in their conversation. There’s one from when Butler grabbed his palm, asking Harry to take care of Merlin, which did not work out all that well for either one of them. Then, there are photographs of Harry, visibly distraught, entering Butler’s house, and later leaving it in even more agitation, his hair mussed, and his brows knit in an expression that seems both pained and perplexed. The timestamp places his visit ruthlessly close to the estimated time of death, and, had Harry not known the truth, he would have had to agree that the situation does not look too good for him.

“Well, you have the pictures,” Harry grins, leaning back in an uncomfortable rickety chair. “There was a real spark there, so I came to deepen our connection, if you will.”

“And?” the DCI asks, pretending to studiously make notes in his notebook. Even at the angle, Harry can see that he is just doodling.

“He did not answer the door, of course. Him being dead must have been something of an impediment.”

“And you want me to believe that you just, what, kept knocking on his door for,” the DCI makes a show of checking the respective time stamps on the before and after photographs, “seventeen minutes?”

Harry flashes him a baffled grin. “I was drunk on his smell. You wouldn’t understand, obviously. Never was a story of more woe. And now, if you’ll excuse me, it is in our best interest if you escort me to the toilet.”

The DCI, unperturbed, flicks open the folder that lay closed in front of him, and hands Harry a new set of photographs. These are from Butler’s flat too, but not of the set that was offered Harry from the word go. These finally show an ugly graffiti on the drawing room wall, a smudged letter omega with a sniper’s rifle drawn into it. It seems incongruous in the light and spacious room, like an angry scar on the face of a young child. Harry winces. Somehow, he did not expect this to crop up, counting the seconds to his release as he was, except that he should have predicted this.

“So, you are implying that it was a crime of passion. Maybe you two had a falling-out, maybe he refused your advances, you lashed out, and then, panicking, tried to cover your tracks by pretending it was a terrorist attack.”

“I am implying no such thing,” Harry growls and makes to stand up. “I have to go, nature calls.”

The DCI, a lowly beta, springs up and shoves on his shoulders with barely contained glee, pushing him back to his seat, and Harry, handcuffs limiting his mobility and impairing his balance, has no choice but to relax into the motion. Then, with a well-measured kick at a table leg, the DCI forcefully rams the edge of the table into Harry’s stomach.

A wet patch appears over the front of his trousers, hot and spreading fast. Harry bares his teeth through treacherous relief, his mind still commanding his body to hold on, but the body already sagging back around the pain of that jab, unable and unwilling to stop squirting urine down his trouser leg. The unpleasant wet warmth running into his shoe and suffusing the seat hits Harry just a second before the smell reaches his nose, and he barely contains the urge to retch. It is in that second that Harry knows that nobody’s coming for him, or else he would never be treated like this. He’s on his own now, and has to plan accordingly. 

He raises his chin defiantly; he knows all too well that it is but a strategy to humiliate him, to throw him off balance. What can he say? It’s working.

“I thought you alpha boys were potty-trained,” the DCI says, patting him on the shoulder. “You stink.”

“Hope you are enjoying the case, because it is your last,” Harry grits out through clenched teeth. “I need my lawyer.”

“Yes, and the families of these guys need justice. We don’t always get what we want, although I know where my sympathies lie in this particular one, I have to say.” The DCI rifles through his folder again, and shoves another sheaf of pictures into Harry’s face. They show charred corpses, twisted and burned, clad in what probably were military uniforms. Harry squints at them briefly before looking the DCI straight in the eye.

“Tell me, do you get off on it? I shudder to imagine how pathetic your life must be if it takes humiliating an alpha for you to feel the thrill,” Harry tilts his head to the side, trying to gauge if this got a reaction out of the man, but he just seems weary and cautious, the earlier joy of violence drained out of him.

“You arrive at the barracks where the Field Reconnaissance Unit is stationed, and they go up in flames. You visit a notable omega rights activist, and he is found dead. As terrorists go, you are either hopelessly dumb or criminally clueless, or just a spoiled alpha brat who’s used to everything being handed to him on a silver platter. So, you tell me which one it is, Hart.”

“This is absurd,” Harry sneers. “Just ask lieutenant colonel Evans, he was with me the whole time. I did not have an unsupervised moment to plant a bomb, which is not to say that his manners did not tempt me to.”

The DCI’s eyes narrow. He looks down at the photographs and jabs an accusing finger at one of them, showing a badly burned body. “Don’t think I wouldn’t have, Hart, except subpoenas seldom reach the other side. God, you stink.”

“Shit out of luck I am then,” Harry says with a shrug. “Or would have been, if not for the beautiful thing known as the presumption of innocence.”

The DCI looks like he wants to say something, but then just frowns and walks over to the door. He barks “Hose this stinker down thoroughly” and waves the guards in.

Harry knows that he’s at their mercy now, so he’d better play along biding his time before his family gets him out if Kingsman won’t, but at the sight of a dusty sack in the hands of one of the guards his body reacts before his mind has a chance to contribute. He starts to stand up with a solicitous little smile on his lips, and as the guard gets close enough, Harry knocks his forehead into his nose. As the first one staggers off, clutching at his bloodied face, Harry swipes out with the side of his shoe at the ankles of the second one. He does not have enough room to make the kick truly effective, but at least it throws the man off-balance a little. There’s only one way this altercation can end, and that is clearly not in Harry’s favour, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t enjoy it while it lasts.

He jabs the guard under the chin with his handcuffed hands, leaning back at the same time to avoid the punch from the DCI. The fight is aimless, and all the more beautiful for it. It’s not like Harry can escape, but he takes great joy in the way his muscles ripple under his skin, the way his blood sings with adrenaline. His elbow connects with someone’s solar plexus, his knee crashes into someone’s groin; Harry grins manically. Let them come. He quickly wheels around the chair and kicks it at the knees of the closest of the attackers, and the man goes down, but, instead of obediently falling backwards to impede the attack, he leans forward, tumbling on Harry. Harry tries to raise is his arms to push the man off or to regain his balance, but the handcuffs cut painfully into the skin of his wrists, and they crash to the floor together in an undignified tumble.

A hood is pulled over his head. Harry coughs as the dust hits his nostrils, and there’s a panicked moment when he thinks that he cannot breathe. To still his racing thoughts, he tries to note as much of his surroundings as he can, relying on muscle memory to map out the route to cell 4: down two flights of stairs, of eight and six stairs respectively, thirty six shuffling steps along the corridor filled with the eye-watering smell of chlorine, three steps up and a sharp turn right. The door screeches open, and he is pushed forward with more force than the situation warranted. He tries to stay up, and fails. He cushions most of the blow of his impact with the floor with his shoulder, as he was taught, but his cheek still scrapes against the cement floor. He hisses, not giving them the satisfaction of a yelp, and then they are on him, handcuffs clicking locked around his ankles, someone pushing him forward to chain his wrists to his ankles.

“The hose,” someone barks behind him. Harry tries to scramble to a crouching position, but that’s when icy water blasts at his chest, knocking him back to the ground. The water pressure is high enough for the spurts to leave bruises. He curses, throwing his head back and writhing in the stream, scraping his skin raw on the cement, before it dawns that that’s the least of his worries, and then he thinks of nothing at all. Water soaks the hood, which immediately clings to Harry’s face like a second skin, only denser, too tight, painful; he gasps, opening his mouth wide, trying to suck in air, but all he gets is a mouthful of wet fabric. Before he can think better of it, his chest constricts, pushing the last precious dregs of air out in what was meant to be a scream, but ends up as a choked-off cough. Convulsing, he throws his body around, trying to avoid the worst of the blast of water, hoping to attract attention, his lungs burn, his chest spasming on emptiness, the seconds drag and hurt like pinpricks of hot needles, he tries to push the scratchy fabric out of the way with his lolling tongue, and it does not help any, nothing does. Luminescent whiteness spreads over his field of vision, and he claws at it while he still has any stubborn resistance in him, and for some time past that point too, until he doesn’t anymore.

He comes to from a slap. A hit on his scraped cheek reverberates in dulled pain deep in his skull as someone pushes his eyelid up and shines a flashlight into his eye. He coughs, sucking in air until his chest hurts, and then vomits, bile burning his raw throat.

“He’ll live,” the man says with barely contained disgust, and lets Harry’s shoulders go.

Harry slumps back to the ground. This time, his skull connects with the wet floor with a dull crack.

“Who is your contact in the Omega Liberation Front?” The familiar DCI leans over him, his expression almost kind, but not quite.

Harry tries to shake his head, too busy breathing to say anything just yet, and just scrapes it further on the floor.

“How do you contact him? Is there regular contact, or do they just solicit your help when the need arises?”

“There’s no contact, you bastard,” Harry rasps, calculating what he can indeed divulge, and what secrets should be kept at all costs, and how he can work the former around the latter without leaving any suspicious gaps.

“No need to be so rash,” the DCI clucks his tongue, and gestures to the guard behind him. “We’ll juts let you think about it for a while, alright?”

A new, dry hood goes over his head, locking Harry in with the sour smell of his own vomit, and the guards leave him in his darkness. He tries to relax and clear his mind, but the pull of the manacles puts pressure on the muscles of his calves and shoulders that will turn to agony later. He has to concentrate now, Harry tells himself, and bites his lip.

Would Kingsman really ditch him? Kingsman were too important a part of the intelligence network, and knew too much to risk antagonizing them so. None of this could have happened without Arthur signing off on every step. The question of whether Arthur really believes in Harry’s complicity or is just willing to sacrifice him to protect Merlin remains open.

Harry tries to turn, hoping that a new position would relief some of the pressure on his strained muscles, but the effort only ignites the flares of pain into a steady deep burn. He plops back onto the wet floor and carefully breathes, mouth open, to deny them, whoever they are, the pleasure of hearing him grunt in pain.

God, what wouldn’t he give for a sip of water to wash away the taste of bile burning his tongue, to ease the scratch in his parched throat. He considers rubbing his face against the floor and squeezing droplets from the hood between his lips, but he remembers the earlier horror and urgency all too vividly. He does not know how much time has passed, and the usual ways of gauging time – the rhythm of his breathing, the steady beat of his pulse – have all gone haywire. He makes the last effort to think rationally. Kingsman sent him to a rally where the police awaited him. To be honest, Merlin did try to get him out of harm’s way, if for completely selfish reasons. For that if for nothing else, Harry owes him several hours of silence that would allow Merlin to run. Everybody talks in the end, Harry knows. It is not a matter of staying silent indefinitely, because indefinitely is a really long time if you cram it full of pain, but rather of not talking right this second, and then the next, and the one after that.

Shudders rake through his body, setting his teeth chattering, twisting his muscles and joints, searing, but at least that part is not new, because by that point, everything, including breathing, hurts. At first Harry thinks that it’s the cold, because cold he is, freezing even, laid out on wet cement for hours, and he does not realize until wetness seeps through the hood that he’s crying. The action is disconnected from anything he might feel, it’s just his body begging for movement, and warmth, and mercy, begging him to start talking. He tries to move his sleeping wrists and awkwardly pats himself on the calf in a manner that he hopes is consoling before another bone-wrenching sob rakes through his body.

After that comes the anger, making his throat clench and his whole body thrum with the need to lash out, run, do anything at all. He is angry at his body, the vulnerable lump of pain that it is, at Kingsman for dragging him down to his lowest, at- with a laugh, he realizes that he can no longer be angry at Merlin. If this is what being an omega feels like, being stripped of control and security, than he can damn well sympathize with those that choose violence, even if, ultimately, it does not help but for a brief respite from the mounting pressure of despair.

If he understands the man, it does not yet mean that he would be ready to protect him at the cost of his life. The door bangs open, and he is jerked up, or as far up as he can go in his manacled position. He is made to stand, bent at the waist, on shaky legs that almost give out under him.

“We are transferring you to another facility.”

They drag him on, and it takes the pain of falling to his knees a couple of times to realize the full extent of the shit show he’s in. As long as he’s in the system, he has all the chances of leaving it in one peace, worse for wear, but alive nonetheless. Other facilities were all too likely to belong to one of the shadow institutions like Kingsman, keeping the peace and order by doing the things that needed to be done while the public chose not to have them done in its name. Harry knew Kingsman were not the only ones, and, having encountered the other, more specialized units a couple of times, he knows that they have little qualms about making people cease to be a problem for good.

It’s time to talk, he thinks, and then rasps, “Wait.” His skin feels too tight in all the wrong places, it chafes and burns.

“I am ready to make a deposition,” he says, and coughs, choking on words, choking on the things that scare him, thinking of Merlin, the clammy clasp of his bony fingers on that last evening, the wild horror in his eyes. “I know whom you want.”

The man pokes Harry between the shoulderblades with what feels like the butt of a gun. “Does not matter anymore. Just walk, buddy.”

There’s little he can do, chained as he is, but shuffle forward. When they find themselves outside, one of the guards pulls the hood off Harry’s head. Milky dawn light is washing over the courtyard, putting the duration of Harry’s captivity at about sixteen ours, give or take. He’s momentarily ashamed of himself for how quickly they broke him, and yet cannot help smirking. In the unlikely event that he’ll live long enough to find himself in a similar predicament again, it will doubtlessly come easier.

The guard goes down on one knee to unlock Harry’s handcuffs, both on his wrists and on his ankles, and then pushes Harry into the backseat of an awaiting SUV.

There’s a pane of bulletproof glass between the backseat and the driver’s seat, but he is unbound now, so whoever thought he would go down easily should have thought twice. He rotates his wrists and ankles, prodding the muscles to wake up, and clenches his fists experimentally a coupe of times. When the door opposite him swings open, he is ready to kick in the teeth of whoever shows his face, only to stare up into Merlin’s smile.

“Idiots,” Merlin grunts, slipping into the seat next to him. “As if you would harbour deep ideological beliefs about things that have nothing to do with the vintage of your wine or the thread count of your linen. You look awful, by the way.”

He’s home, Harry thinks. Kingsman came for him. Merlin did; no doubt, at a risk. Harry knows that he reeks, but it does not matter, for this is Merlin, who has seen him at his worst. Harry slumps against him, letting Merlin’s smell drown out the rest. Merlin tenses at his touch, but then relaxes, briefly letting his chin rest against the top of Harry’s head. Harry presses his nose to Merlin’s skin, nudges against the edge of his jaw with his nose and lips, jolted even closer as the SUV starts moving. Something’s changed about Merlin’s smell, Harry thinks, not enough to render it unrecognizable, but enough to add something uncannily alien to the previously familiar whiff. It hits Harry like a blast of cold water, and he shudders away: Merlin is with child. Harry frantically gives him a once-over, not that he cold see anything under a cashmere trench coat. But smells, unlike people, don’t lie.

“You are safe,” Merlin snaps like it’s a command, misinterpreting Harry’s unease, and places his palm on the back of Harry’s head.

“I did not tell them about you,” Harry stutters with the overwhelming joy of the guilty. He would have, of course. But he didn’t, and that’s all that counts.

Merlin grabs him by the shoulders and holds him at arm’s length, searching his face for an explanation.

Finally, tensely, he asks, “The fuck are you on about?”


	10. Chapter 10

Merlin’s not even angry, that’s what finally sways Harry and makes him recoil in regret and belated horror. Propping his chin up on steepled fingers, he looks past Harry without much interest. His tone is perfectly flat when he slouches back in his chair and offers, “And, just out of general interest, did you think up all that just because I’m an omega?” 

Harry winces. “Don’t wield that as a noun. It might be an adjective to describe you, one of many, but it’s not a noun defining you.”

“But that _is_ what I am, whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not.” Merlin rolls his eyes, and it’s the first flash of genuine emotion that he showed since Harry backed him into his room and, after asking to switch off the cameras, informed him that he knows about Merlin’s involvement with the Omega Liberation Front.

That is what Merlin is, the phrase sharp like a shard of glass, but Harry still repeats it to try it on for size, and shrugs with a sudden chill as he thinks of Merlin’s changed smell, of a thing growing inside him, changing his body, forcing it open. Still, he cannot agree with him, not fully. “You-”

But Merlin presses on, cutting Harry off with an impatient gesture. “And if I tell you that that’s what I am, you shut up and listen, and don’t you dare pull the ‘But you are not like the other omegas’ crap on me, because I’m reasonably sure that I still can take you out in a fight.” He rubs at his brow, and then cracks a crooked smile, brittle like eggshell. “Wait, was that your way of shrugging off the more pressing question of why you would think me a traitor?”

“Maybe,” Harry throws back his head and points at the corners of the room. “Are you sure that the cameras are off?”

Even after Merlin nods, Harry still lowers his voice. “Butler was killed with a Kingsman issue bullet. Whoever did it had access to Kingsman resources.”

“That wasn’t in the reports,” Merlin snaps to alertness, immediately sitting up straight. “I saw the reports, and it wasn’t.”

Harry feels a treacherous blush spread across his cheeks. “It wouldn’t be. I threw the bullet out, because I could not bear the thought of- never mind.”

It’s not till then that Harry finally notices how worn-out Merlin is. Merlin rubs at his eyes, red-rimmed and shocking against his pallor, and Harry can see the fine blue veins on his temples. “You are a very peculiar young man, anybody told you that? You would believe your friend a killer-

“Technically, all my friends are. Comes with the job,” Harry huffs petulantly.

“You would believe, without much evidence too, that I am behind a terrorist organization, and that I would kill my friend. And, even given that, you still wouldn’t think twice of disposing of the incriminating evidence and hiding your findings from Arthur.”

It’s not like Harry did not have evidence though, it just looks somewhat thin under Merlin’s impassive stare. Merlin’s indifference hurts more than his anger would, like he already gave Harry up, like the distance between them could no longer be crossed. To cover the dark miles upon miles stretching between them, Harry raises his voice, stands up to loom over Merlin. “That evening, it looked like you were in a skirmish. And Butler did let his killer in, and he had defensive wounds that would match what you had. Oh, and you would not let me come near you, which was nifty if you did not want me to smell the gun powder.”

“I did not want you to smell the heat coming on, alright?” Merlin says, without looking up at him. “I had a hard enough time persuading Percival that I’m indisposed to mate with him in the market square, or anywhere at all, for that matter, and I still hoped that the suppressants might work. They didn’t.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Harry decides to lay it all out. “I thought you might have taken the inducers yourself, to take me out of the game.”

For a second, Merlin looks like he wants hit Harry, and Harry steels himself for the punch, but the moment passes. “You have no idea what it- but then, why would you. Right, go get some sleep. I will review everything we have on the case, and we’ll take it to Arthur tomorrow. He’ll love your little detour, by the way. I will save the footage and rewatch it in the moments of dark crushing despair.”

Merlin gets up and collects the folders on his desk, clutching them to his chest like a shield.

“I’m sorry,” Harry breathes out, his tongue clumsy around the words, and reaches out to touch Merlin’s hand, but Merlin leans back, out of his reach.

“I know you are. But that’s that, since you ran off kicking and screaming.”

“It was hardly kicking and screaming, don’t be overly dramatic.”

“Kicking and screaming,” Merlin repeats with malicious emphasis, and opens the door for him. “Off you go.”

The darkness of his room is empty and boundless. Harry draws the curtains to block out the background light and hits out at the air in a swift uppercut, and, not giving it time to regroup, follows up with a straight punch with his left fist. There are no shadows in the dark, which means that the shadows are everywhere, crowding in on him, reaching and whispering. He swings out with his right foot, kicking at the shins that are not there, and waits for the sound of the fall. He goes to his knees and keeps pounding at the carpeted floor until he is sweating, crushing to a pulp all those moments when he was weak, and scared, and did not know what to do. You cannot win against your shadow, which means that you will lose.

Afterwards, he crashes on his bed, cradling his bruised knuckles under his armpits, and waits for the other shore of the night to creep up on him, craving the milky light that would chase away the pull in his muscles, the phantom roughness of wet cement against his skin. Each time he almost drifts off, he is jerked back by a pang of pain, or, worse yet, regret. Finally, he gives in and walks back to Merlin’s office.

“May I stay with you? Just for the night?” He asks, expecting Merlin to refuse.

However, Merlin nods at the beat-up sofa in the corner without looking up from his paperwork. Deciding not to provoke him with further chatter, Harry quickly toes off his shoes and curls up there, pulling a thin quilt over his head.

He did not think he would relax, but he does, lulled by Merlin’s presence and the rustling of papers. Tension slowly drains out of his muscles, and minute tremors finally subside. He is too weary to sleep, but for the first time he realizes that he might be fine, burrowed in the dusty cushions, breathing the air that smells of his sweat and Merlin’s.

He’s not sure how much time has passed when Merlin asks quietly, “You awake?” In lieu of an answer, Harry pulls the quilt off his face. Merlin nods, scrutinizing his hands clenched into fists over his knees. “I miss the clarity of knowing what I want. Of all things, that’s what I miss, and I did not expect that.”

Harry settles for a noncommittal grunt, afraid to interrupt.

“Mating is such a muddle. It’s like growing an extra pair of limbs, all of a sudden. On some days, it’s all you can think of, this suffocating lump of possessive greed in your throat. And you are unequipped for dealing with it, they, these limbs, they get in the way of your thoughts, because they were not there before, were they? Except that they are gloriously yours, and you wouldn’t trade them for the world. Does not make it easier, though, when you are theirs too, and not yours anymore.”

Merlin is not usually much of a talker. His words are substitutes for actions, orders to be acted upon, writ across the fabric of reality in stolen secrets and traces of blood. Harry’s unaccustomed to dealing with him in this unfamiliar pensive mood, did not through their years of friendship even know that Merlin had pensive moods to begin with, so he sits up on the sofa and tries to pull him back to actions in the one way he knows.

“Fuck me,” Harry says, as casually as he can. “At least you’d know I’m yours, and I would not lay any grand claims on your thoughts. Other than an occasional ‘The young Hart is such a gorgeous stud.’ That thought I would actually appreciate.”

For a moment, Merlin looks at him as if he grew an extra head, complete with horns and maybe even flashing Christmas lights. It takes all he has for Harry to steel himself and not backtrack, but he manages. Eventually, Merlin throws back his head and laughs, honest bubbling glee at the sheer incongruity of his surroundings. He laughs and laughs; Harry gets off the sofa and walks over, carefully touches the nape of his neck. Laughter ceases as if somebody pulled a switch, and Merlin sits up straight, weary and apprehensive.

“If you think of it as some sort of penance, or redemption, if you will, cut it. It will not undo anything.”

Harry presses his fingers to Merlin’s lips, cold and dry under his touch.

“Stop overthinking it. I want you in me.”

Merlin stands up without saying a word, and for a second, Harry thinks that that’s it, he’s dug himself in deep this time, but then, Merlin pulls his jumper off.

Merlin is all angles and rippling muscles; his pregnancy does not show yet, but then, Harry does not know when it is supposed to start showing anyway. He runs his fingers over Merlin’s ribs, careful to avoid his belly, and the touch soothes him. He dips down and rolls a nipple between his lips, worrying at it with the tip of his tongue, while his palm gives Merlin’s half-hard cock a few experimental pumps.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Merlin snaps, and Harry follows suit and quickly ditches his clothes. He’s grateful that Merlin does not ask any of those silly inconsequential questions like “are you sure?” or “are you ready?”, because, of the two of them, Merlin is the one for strategies and long cons, and he himself is perfectly happy with being in the moment, listening to the frantic heartbeats, shivering with the early thrill of excitement.

“The sofa. I’m not dealing with spills over my paperwork again.”

Harry winces at that “again,” but obeys, plopping down and spreading his legs. He sure as hell hopes that human bodies are a one size fits all deal, because Merlin is impressive. Harry has never entertained the idea of taking that, spreading around it and giving in, but now he cannot think of anything else, and the thought sends a shiver down his spine. He wraps his palm around his cock, and hooks one leg up over the back of the sofa to give Merlin a better view.

Merlin reaches between his legs and coats his fingers with his own slick, and the hoarse moan Harry lets out at the sight catches him by surprise. He chuckles, and keeps chuckling until Merlin settles between his legs and pushes, around and in.

Harry pulls him down into a kiss, his tongue prodding into Merlin’s mouth, licking into the tang of coffee and something that is uniquely Merlin, as Merlin’s fingers dart in and out of his arse. The rough frantic movements of his fingers do not feel like sex, or at least not yet, and Harry tries to acquaint himself with the idea, jerking at his cock in short awkward tugs, his wrist caught under the weight of Merlin’s body. For a second, the fingers withdraw, and he moans into Merlin’s mouth disapprovingly, but then the pressure resumes. Merlin added another one, he guesses: this time, he feels stretched, full like a cup filled to the brims and as unstable, light-headed with the hint of pain. He jerks his hips to check if there’s any give, and that drives Merlin’s fingers deeper against something that makes him clamp and swear. He keeps rocking into Merlin’s scissoring motion, clamping and relaxing around his fingers, drifting blindly along the current of sensations that pulls him under. He does not remember to breathe until his throat constricts on a stifled whine.

Finally, Merlin smirks against his mouth, a curt twist of those cold thin lips, and sits back. With half-hooded, drunk eyes, Harry watches as Merlin smears his slick over his cock, and lines up against him.

“Relax,” Merlin grunts unkindly as Harry tenses against the push, his eyes flying wide open. “Breathe.”

This is too much, Harry’s not yet sure if he can take it, or if he wants to, really, and at the same time, it’s not enough. Harry cants his hips up, trying to bring Merlin’s thrusts to bear on that spot that made him feel scrubbed raw, electrified, his mind a burned expanse of sensations that he did not have words for. He resents the feeling of being impossibly, painfully open, the vulnerability of it, and wonders vindictively if it was like that for Merlin, whose biology made him beg for this. Guilty at the thought, he arches into the press of Merlin’s body, holding onto his shoulders like a drowning man as Merlin keeps opening him up on his cock. With the last push, Merlin finally slides all the way in and stills, pressing his forehead to Harry’s shoulder. Harry breathes out through his nose, tries to concentrate on the sensations that are not the stretching burn in his arse.

Finally, Harry lets his fingers ghost over the back of Merlin’s head, and whispers against his skin, “This does not work. Off, on your back.”

Harry raises himself up on his elbows, and shifts slightly back, up the sofa.

“I will ride you,” Harry clarifies, unsettled with how Merlin immediately went tense at the words, “like a fiery steed into the sunset.”

“You killed the mood,” Merlin says with stifled amusement. Harry didn’t.

Harry straddles his hips and holds his breath against the pain, but this time, with him controlling the pace, it’s just a tired dull burn, tempting like worrying at a split lip, measured tamed pangs reminding him that he’s alive. He rolls his hips, trying to find the right angle, and, bracing himself against Merlin’s chest, settles into a rhythm, torturously slow drag upwards that makes him shiver at the emptiness he was not aware of before, and a swift crash down, driving Merlin deeper into him with every push. His body clenches around Merlin against his will, and Merlin covers his lips with a palm before he can howl and wake the entire compound. Merlin’s palm still smells and tastes like his slick, and Harry laps it up greedily, impaling his arse on Merlin’s cock. The sensation is unfamiliar, staggering, not what he knew to expect or to want, but astounding in its own way. He is out of breath, jerking along that length in him, reveling in its slide inside, easier with each thrust, crushing into him, crushing his resistance.

“Shhh,” Merlin hisses and, clutching Harry’s hips, pounds into him in short stuttering jerks. Harry stays still, letting Merlin take him and use him, each thrust pushing him closer to the edge. Still, it takes him by surprise, the long dragging spurts, his orgasm crashing on Harry like a wave, vast and inexorable. As his body clenches, he pushes down on Merlin, demanding more, trying to pound every last sensation out of it, this is his one chance, and he intends to make it matter. Merlin follows with a short whine and a brief spasm, twisting under him, efficient and unobtrusive even in this; and slips out.

“Look what we’ve got here,” Merlin grins, lazy yet smug.

Harry looks down, and is mortified to see a perfectly formed knot. He blushes; his arse is still stretched open, dribbling Merlin’s come over the cushions, yet it is this, the knot, that somehow does not seem appropriate. “I thought this only happened when alphas smell heat.”

“Ever been with an omega before? Well, physiology will always find a way to let you down. Come here.”

Merlin helps Harry settle against his side, Harry’s head pillowed against the crook of his elbow, and cradles his knot in his palm. Harry closes his eyes and relaxes into his warmth, sated and boneless, occasionally jerking his hips as Merlin gives his knot a light squeeze.

“I’ve seen you with Arthur,” Harry murmurs without opening his eyes. “Would you have been like that with me?”

He dreads the answer, but for a field agent, dread is too often a guide rather than a keep out sign, so he waits patiently. After a while, Merlin smirks.

“I’d be whatever you wanted me to be. So, no, not quite like with Arthur, because he craves power in the way that you don’t. What is it that you crave?”

This gives Harry a pause. He wants Merlin, he thinks, the package deal, the good and the bad, but that answer is an easy cop-out. “Your competence,” he says finally, cautiously.

“So does he.”

“Your faith in me,” he says, crawling over thin ice.

“So does he, but please don’t tell him that. So, maybe not that different after all.”

Harry presses his nose into Merlin’s armpit, breathing in the smell of his sweat. He harbours no illusions about this becoming a regular thing, so he tries to store up all the memories he can get.

“It all sounds like a nightmare, the mating,” he finally says, and immediately regrets it.

“It’s not, especially not when I’m with him. I meant it, what I said about the extra limbs. Maybe I did not grow up with them, but I wouldn’t want to lose them. Now, if you’ll excuse me-” Naked, Merlin pads to a small bathroom.

He takes an awfully long time, Harry thinks, scratching Harry’s smell, the smell that does not belong, off his skin.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of this was written during a somewhat suspenceful layover while I was waiting to find out if I will make it onto an overbooked flight (spoilers: everything ended well), which is to say, I just moved back to my (non-English-speaking) home country for a while, and I really hope that I'll manage to finish this before my English inevitably plummets. Actual action coming up in the next chapter, I promise! XD

When Harry sits up with a start, the slimy, murky dregs of a dream trailing after him into the waking moments, Merlin is already at his desk, absent-mindedly dragging his fingers over a sheaf of papers laid out in front of him. 

“It’s still early,” Merlin says without looking up at him, “go back to sleep.”

“Did you sleep at all?” Harry asks cautiously, and Merlin’s hassled, slightly disoriented glance is answer enough. He raises his hands. “Alright, alright, how stupid of me to even ask. When did you last sleep?”

Merlin jerks his head noncommittally, and then, finally regaining composure, barks half-heartedly, “Doesn’t matter. I’m on a deadline.”

With a yawn, Harry drags himself off the sofa and kicks a vacant chair closer to the desk. As he sits down, he is rewarded with a dull ache in his arse, which fills him with breathless guilty pride. Furtively, he glances up at Merlin, and bites his lip at the memory of that stolen slice of the night, the jagged shard of time that does not fit, something frantic and not quite pleasant, shrouded in shadows. Fleeting though those moments might have been, they still left a trace in his sore muscles, in the fingerprint-sized bruises on his hips.

Giddy with joy and the lack of sleep, Harry leans into Merlin’s space and grins. “Fine, show me what we have.”

“There’s a traitor in Kingsman, our one lead was shot before he could start talking, and we don’t even know if we are dealing with two cases or one. Fuck all just about covers it,” and there’s a barest note of self-pity in Merlin’s voice.

“Why don’t we try to sift through that fuck all by categories. Let me just get us some coffee.”

Merlin downs his mug in one gulp, almost choking on the last tarry dregs, while Harry winces through each tiny sip, the slightly acrid aftertaste of black unsweetened coffee waking him to reality.

Setting his mug aside, Merlin sighs. “We don’t yet know where the Omega Liberation Front gets its supplies, or its recruits, for that matter. You’d think that the latter would be in short supply, by the way, what with their changed tactics-”

“And those are-? I’m slightly out of date on my atrocities here, what with Kuwait and a stint in prison.”

For a second, Merlin’s face contorts with bitterness; controlled and tense, he stretches, and a flash of his pale wrists showing from under the sleeves of his jumper chases a misplaced protective urge across Harry’s mind. With feigned nonchalance, Merlin drawls, “Oh, they mostly go after omega organizations and businesses these days. The ones that they don’t agree with, they brand them as collaborators.”

“Like Butler,” Harry offers cautiously.

“I’d say so, if not for the Kingsman bullet.” 

“So, this is the part where you don’t know if we have two cases or one.”

“Quite. Without the Kingsman bullet in the picture, it is firmly the OLF business. As is, you can take your pick on what you like less: one of our own working for the Omega Liberation Front, or one of our own on an independent crusade against omega rights movement that he just happens to pass off as an act of the Omega Liberation Front.”

“Or one of our own deciding to frame you for murder.”

“Unlikely. I’m disposable, or, rather, there are easier ways to get me out of the picture. One of them even worked.”

Harry pats him on the shoulder. “Your penchant for melodrama is one of your less endearing qualities. The fact that you are mated absolutely does not make you any less of a professional.”

Merlin sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, and says, quiet, barely audible, “As much as I’m grateful to you for not commenting on it, I know you can smell it. I wish I knew how many months of work I have left, but I don’t, so we are on a deadline, and I’d appreciate it if we stopped burning daylight.”

Merlin is not looking him in the eye. Harry wants to tip back his head, make him look, crawl into his skin and _understand_ , but he does not dare to reach over. Instead, he just sits up in his chair ramrod-straight, and moves on. “The police watched Butler’s flat. They had photographs of me entering the building. They must also have pictures of the killer.”

Merlin shakes his head. “There was a window of about ten minutes when shifts changed. Ten easily stretches to fifteen, or more, if you don’t think that your target is dangerous. Anyway, you are the only recorded visitor around the time of death.”

“Why would they watch him to begin with?” Harry asks, drumming on the table with his knuckles.

“Whatever you are implying-“ Merlin takes several deep breaths, and then, with an effort, drops his shoulders. “They’ve been watching him for years now. He was the closest we had to political representation.”

Merlin’s voice shakes just a little; at the time, Harry was so wrapped up in his theory that he forgot to notice that Merlin lost a friend. Belatedly, he asks, “Tell me about him.”

The silence stretches, not yet uncomfortable, just empty and resounding in the distance between them. Finally, Merlin snaps, “That has nothing to do with it.”

Harry just leans closer. “We need to know why someone would want to put a bullet through his head. What kind of man he was?”

“He would bring coffee for the police surveillance team,” Merlin finally says, like that explains everything, and goes silent again. Harry does not prod; he waits, and eventually Merlin continues. “So many men, more powerful than Noel ever was, would avoid his house like plague to not be caught on tape with him, and he would just laugh at it all. Coffee, can you imagine? He would ask them for a ride too. He also slept with some of them, probably not as many as he liked to make out, but he was going steady with one. He had guts, and when you told him that something was impossible, he would just nod, say ‘what an interesting example of nonsense,’ and do it anyway, and now he’s dead, and none of that matters. And I was not at his funeral, because I was too busy having my brains fucked out,” he finishes with gusto.

“Do these guilt trips of yours make you happier?” Harry asks, wincing.

Merlin gulps for breath, but then lets out a thin laugh. “Yes they do, thank you for asking. They take my mind off other things.”

Harry thinks of the unsavoury mess of blood, brains and bones on the carpet. While assassinations are not the primary Kingsman specialty, Harry has several hits to his name. Not as many as Lancelot or Percival, of course, who have been at it for years, or even Gawain, who is notoriously trigger-happy, the prick, but still, quite a few. Yet his kills seem clinical and detached, and he never got to know much about his marks past the details of what got them the verdict. Aside from those, Butler’s was the first violent death that he witnessed up close, and it seems more intimate, the end in stark contrast with the flashes of life he saw. Quietly, he notes, “It was quick. But he did let the killer in and offered him wine.”

Merlin’s shoulders slump slightly. “That does not narrow it down. He would talk to just about anybody at least once. And, no, I don’t know who would be interested in his death: alive, he was so much easier to shrug off.”

Merlin falls silent and reshuffles the folders on his desk. For Harry, it does not sink in until that moment that the array of suspects consists of people in the building, probably still asleep mere rooms or floors away, vulnerable in their slumber.

“Somehow, I don’t think Arthur will be too happy with any of this,” he says experimentally.

“No he will not,” Merlin concurs a little bit too easily, an edge of his mouth twitching up.

At this, Harry perks up. “Speaking of, might be nothing, but I think we should talk to Unwin’s friend. I think he knew something. Maybe Arthur wouldn’t defenestrate me if we bring him something tangible first.”

Truth be told, Harry is not that sure if James Spencer knew anything at all useful, and the case leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but he desperately wants this, an adventure to share with Merlin, especially if it might be their last.

Merlin cocks his head to the side, his eyes brimming with amusement. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man wanted for murder and a pregnant omega walk into a bar-” Through the years in Kingsman, Merlin has had numerous occasions to perfect his smug look, but it still comes out excited rather than priggish. Harry cannot help but view this as a moment of modest triumph: they are in it with Merlin, and Arthur is not, just like in the good old days.

“The plan is foolproof,” Harry nods sagely. “What could possibly go wrong?”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got sidetracked by the characters emoting, so the plot got pushed back a chapter AGAIN. But at least everything's planned out: there are about 4 more plot-heavy chapters to go, and that's it. Unless I get sidetracked by the drama some more, um. *hangs head in shame*
> 
> Here, have a pretty song that is my mental soundtrack for the fic: ["Le Chatiment du Traitre" by Rome.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzHSYLS5ulQ)

Staring at Merlin over a bloated dead body half-covered by a plastic sheet, Harry winces theatrically. “Do you ever think that we should maybe find a better hobby?”

Harry would give Merlin’s feeble attempt at an eye roll A+ for effort, given the circumstances, but a handkerchief that Merlin circumspectly holds to his face significantly dampens his attempt at sarcasm. Eventually, Merlin settles for a somewhat lopsided frown. “Stop it, you are not even the one who’s going through a messy divorce with the contents of your stomach. Are you absolutely certain that it’s not him?”

Harry takes another perfunctory look at the face; the skin is puffy, the shade of pale violet that no living human being can ever reach, and already split and fraying in places, either from contact with the bottom of the pond, or nibbled on by fish. He mentally compares it to the picture in the dossier: he finds recognizing the dead from photographs easier than from memories of a living and laughing person. He shakes his head.

“As much as one can be certain. Hardly in pristine condition, this one.”

“Better luck next time,” Merlin murmurs, turning to go.

“Can you sign for him?” the guard of the morgue stops Harry as they are about to leave, pointing a pen at Merlin with an expression of slight distaste. “No unattended omegas in public institutions, as per last week’s regulations.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, he’s not my luggage to be called-”

“Just sign it,” Merlin sneers, pushing him towards the desk. “What do you expect him to do? Few people have the leisure to indulge in your rage against the world.”

Harry, however, does not let up on their drive to the Kingsman manor. “It’s just-”

Merlin jerks up a brow with obvious curiosity. “What, unfair? Precious little in life is.”

Harry shakes his head. “Distasteful. One is a moral judgment, the other aesthetic, and you know which one I would stand for.”

Surreptitiously, making sure that the driver wouldn’t see, Merlin reaches over and gives Harry’s hand a brief conciliatory squeeze. The warmth and firm press of his fingers is gone almost before Harry has time to fully register it, and he just stares at his palm as if it was alien, incomprehensible. Then, swallowing hard, he looks up at Merlin. The expression of schooled neutrality on Merlin’s face gives nothing away, but still, Harry cannot help searching for clues. He wonders, not for the first time, if other attachments survive the overriding surge of the bond; if there’s any room left in Merlin’s mind that is not warped around the mating scar that Arthur left on his neck, around the thing growing inside him.

Finally, he says, “It’s good news that the body is not Spencer, isn’t it? More chances that we will find him alive.”

Merlin scowls. “It means no such thing.”

“Spoilsport. Why would you immediately assume that he is dead anyway? Maybe he is sniffing coke off nubile young bodies at a tropical island right as we speak, none the wiser about the fact that we are combing through mortuaries for his body.”

“Not everybody shares your taste in entertainment,” Merlin says sternly, but his eyes brim with stifled laughter. Nonetheless, he adds after a while, “A certain someone who, parenthetically, stills roams free, shot Lee Unwin to stop him from talking. Later that same day, his friend, who either does or does not know whatever it was that got Unwin killed, walks out of the barracks without so much as a spare set of underwear, and disappears into thin air. You do the math.”

“Maybe _he_ did the math,” Harry insists out of stubborn optimism, because someone has to cling to optimism after all, “and decided to take that vacation.”

“Either way, that’s another trail gone cold. At-risk youth outreach centers will probably be unforthcoming too, what with a government crackdown. I’d say that we are back to square one, except I think square one actually had a better view.”

Harry goes still for a moment, and then slowly voices the option that they’ve been cautiously skirting around this whole time. “We could start on the Kingsman angle. Someone had to supply a bullet, if not take the shot. We could start by looking for him.”

Merlin claps him on the shoulder, his expression a curious mixture of condescension, wry amusement and raw anger. “In an organization of well-armed, well-trained and professionally paranoid men, the two agents whose position is best described as precarious are looking for a mole. Honestly, I think there are easier ways to commit suicide.”

“But that _is_ what we are doing.”

Merlin steeples his fingers and looks at Harry through them, his half-concealed face tense and unreadable. “There’s a difference between an independent investigation wherein the mounting evidence just happens to point that way, and actively looking for trouble. Starting at Kingsman is the former. And with your status as a suspect, no matter what you do, it will make the situation seem worse.”

“Stay with me,” Harry says when they finally get back to the manor.

Merlin hesitates for a moment, and then throws him the keys to his office. “I’m going to Arthur’s,” he says with what Harry hopes is a whiff of regret, “but you can stay at my office. Keep working on Spencer’s files.”

They raided Spencer’s London flat earlier that week, Merlin’s decision that does not sit well with Harry. He has no qualms about laying bare the lives of their suspects, or of the dead, but intruding into the space of someone who has done nothing wrong seems most ungentlemanlike. “Good thing I’m not a gentleman then,” Merlin said, hauling out photo albums and notes and dumping them in his office. 

There’s not much by way of personal letters, but photographs are copious. They have been going through them ever since, comparing blurry shots with yearbooks and police records, trying to identify the closest circle of Spencer’s friends.

None of those they tentatively identified seem to have received any unaccounted-for phone calls over the last couple of days though, nothing that would imply that Spencer reached out to them for help, so not only is the work cumbersome and ethically dubious, but it is also largely pointless. Together, they went through everything pertaining to Spencer’s university years, so Harry dived into the debris from the earlier years. 

On those pictures, too few faces make a repeat appearance to lend any of them significance. There’s a lanky teenage Spencer and the village cricket team, and then Spencer at the races, and an array of picnics with an assortment of cousins and second cousins whom Harry recognizes quite well by now, which would have been more helpful had any of them showed any signs of harbouring a fugitive.

Watching the stolen snippets of lives unfold in reverse, grey hair receding and children getting younger as Harry flips through the pages of the albums, is unsettling. He can track the family conflicts through patches of absences, an uncle that got disinvited for several years, spouses and partners that come and go. He wonders idly what could be made of his life in traces such as these, and resents the randomness and irrelevance of it, as probably would Spencer, who is likely as adamant in his faith that the sum total of his life choices cannot be bound to connections he was born into. When Spencer is about twelve, pimply-faced and gangly, Harry notices a diminutive omega woman for the first time. 

At first, Harry pays a slight figure hovering at the outskirts of family gatherings little mind. But then, as he flips over the last pages, she becomes more central, holding the hand of a six year old, laying picture books in front of him. A nanny, he guesses. Cautiously so as not to tear any of them, Harry unglues the pictures from their pages and flips them over, hoping for a name, but none yield any additional information.

Reluctant, he turns on Merlin’s computer and logs onto HOLMES. He finds the compulsory omega registration mildly distasteful, even under the circumstances, and would rather not have to benefit from it, but it’s all for the good cause, he keeps telling himself. The invasiveness of bureaucratic regulations is somewhat mitigated by the deficiencies of the technology, as the system freezes and crashes at every step while he tries to filter the dossiers based on the approximate age and geography he knows.

The results list is not as disastrous as it would have been had he searched for a beta, who account for 70% of the population, but it still numbers in the hundreds. Harry groans, cupping his face in his palms, and starts loading the first dossier.

He’s about a quarter of the list in, with none of the women having listed the Spencer family as their employers, when the first morning birds start chirping outside the windows. He’s considering if he should go back to his room or just take a nap at Merlin’s sofa when a scratching at the door, cautious, barely audible, makes him perk up. He strides to the door, knocking over a stack of papers in his haste, barely daring to hope. Merlin’s at the threshold, his pose uncharacteristically hesitant and defensive.

“Coffee?” Harry asks automatically, stepping aside to let him in. “I have a haystack that might contain a needle, and I’m not diving into it alone.”

Merlin slams the door shut, and cringes at the resounding bang; then, without prelude, takes another step forward and crushes his lips to Harry’s. It’s not a kiss, not quite. For a while, he just breathes, open-mouthed and still, sucking in, in short stuttering sobs, the air that Harry exhales. Harry can smell Arthur on him, could probably taste him too, he thinks, quelling a wave of nausea.

“Let me,” Merlin finally breathes into his mouth. Harry wants to tell him that it will all be fine, but he’s not that good a liar, not with Merlin, so instead he just asks, “Will he come looking for you?”

Merlin shakes his head jerkily, a ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t care,’ Harry cannot be sure. He turns the key in the lock and firmly ushers Merlin towards the bathroom. “You’d better wash up first,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “I greatly respect Arthur in his professional capacity, but I’d rather his smell did not follow me into bed, thank you very much.”

Once they are in the bathroom, Merlin pauses, his hands balling the hem of his sweater.

“Isn’t it a little bit too late for second thoughts?” Harry raises an eyebrow, looking his reflection in the mirror in the eye.

“He’s mine,” Merlin says, decisively pulling the hem of his sweater down.

“And do you expect me to persuade you that it doesn’t matter?” Harry asks carefully.

“I want you to tell me that it’s not all that matters.”

“It isn’t. Which is not to say that it does not matter at all.”

Merlin takes a cautious step back, probing the floor with his bare foot as if it was strewn with shards of glass, and leans his head to the side as he would when offering his neck for a bite. The scar has had time to heal, but the puckered mass of keloid tissue stands out red and angry against his skin. This is indecent, this demonstration of a bond that goes deeper than the coupling of bodies; Harry feels his jaw jerk as he tries to swallow down the lump of anger and bile. He knows he should control himself better, and yet his throat tenses and rumbles around the alpha growl as he spins on Merlin and takes a step into his space.

“You are his omega. You will have his child. What little room there is for me in it will only get more cramped.”

Merlin cowers and recoils, and it is the last reaction Harry would want to see from him, or, at the very least, the last reaction a rational, clear-thinking Harry would. As is, he is thinking with his sense of smell, and the smell that meant safety and home is now mixed with something intractably not his. He revels in Merlin’s dismay: if he would not command Merlin’s love or joy, he could always have this measure of twisted power. “And I would be fine with it,” Harry continues, “not happy, but fine, but don’t you dare ask me to justify it and tell you that it’s all good, because none of it is.”

“But he is mine, don’t you see.” Merlin repeats dumbly. “No matter what he does, I’ll have his back.”

“Fine,” Harry says, trying to breathe calmly, “be that as it may. Please leave.”

Obediently, every bit an omega Harry never quite believed him to be, Merlin steps out, even though it is his own space. The door to the bathroom clicks shut. Harry draws a full sink of cold water and holds his breath, plunging his face in.

His skin tingles before the welcome numbness of the cold settles in. Harry relishes the tightness in his chest as the gulp of breath he holds becomes too vast for it, the light-headedness it bears singing in his temples. Finally, he stands up straight, the rivulets of icy water running down his neck, below his collar. 

Slowly, gradually, he regains his senses and tries to take stock of everything that came to pass. He always knew that Merlin came with complications, not that it stopped him before; if he let himself be fooled by the absence of Arthur’s smell at certain moments, it was nobody’s fault but his. He cannot bear being the only one responsible for and interested in their tryst, he thinks, silently curling his lips around the word, not least for the unwelcome implications of an alpha badgering a weak and demure omega into an illicit and scandalous affair, an image as trite as it is distasteful. Harry splashes cold water in his face again, and thinks of the case, their case. His chest puffing up, Harry thinks that he cannot leave Merlin alone in it, and then lets out a thin laugh at how wrong that sounds. It is Merlin’s case, start to finish, and Merlin has more at stake. Harry was just invited for the ride, and he’ll be damned if he says no to the adventure, because with Merlin, everything is. At higher echelons, Kingsman is about politics and traded favours, but Merlin is one of the precious few who do bring back the half-forgotten thrill of belonging to the cohort of the last knights, keeping the darkness at bay against all odds. When asked, Merlin would probably say that he could not afford idealism, and, for all Harry knows, that was probably true, yet and idealist he was. Harry’s throat constricts in a dry heave as he goes over their conversation, his pride at making Merlin recoil. Even through a surge of guilt, a dark and mad part of him knows how addictive that sort of power could be, and he does not quite know how to face Merlin with that new knowledge of himself, or how to face himself, really.

It’s not until he’s watching the sink drain in a satisfying whirlpool that he realizes that Merlin never once answered his questions. All Merlin said is that Arthur was his to stand by, but that was not what Harry asked, was it? Merlin was arguing with himself, stray arguments spilling over and out. Harry feels a chill run down his spine as he tries to gauge what sorts of questions would merit those answers, and that gives him the last push to lurch out of the bathroom.

“What did he-” Merlin slams into him before he has time to finish, and Harry is not even sure if he wanted the answer, or if Merlin would have given him one. He takes this for his answer, Merlin’s lips pressing into his, Merlin’s tongue impatiently pushing in. Harry can indeed taste Arthur on him, the alien musk, and winces through it, licking deeper into Merlin’s mouth until all that’s left is Merlin, his already familiar bitterness. He is such a fool to have thought that he could do without, Harry thinks desperately, pressing his palms to Merlin’s shoulderblades and pulling him closer.

“More preparation this time, alright? Not that I didn’t appreciate feeling you for a week,” he chuckles into Merlin’s lips.

“We don’t have to,” Merlin pulls back from his grip, “if you don’t want to.”

“Like hell I don’t,” the hoarseness in his own voice takes Harry by surprise as he nudges Merlin towards the sofa.

He might be unsure if he wants to want it, but there’s no denying that he does. Merlin procures a tube of lube this time and makes up for the extra glide by driving two fingers in, Harry’s knee hooked over his elbow.

“Impatient, are we?” Harry smirks, affectionate and smug, amused by the way Merlin knits his brows in concentration, and then words give way to a low moan as Merlin twists his fingers and presses. His thighs jerk together reflexively to trap that clever hand, but Merlin firmly pushes them apart, far enough for an ache to set in against their inner side, momentarily distracting Harry from how impossibly open and pliant he feels. As Merlin works the third finger in, Harry arches off the sofa, either to escape the coil of sensations burning under Merlin’s touch or to plunge deeper into it. “Fuck,” he rasps as Merlin keeps kneading, and “please,” and “yes.”

“Relax,” Merlin commands. Harry wants to obey, whispers “But I am relaxed,” as Merlin wipes at the crease between his brows.

“No you are not,” and the palm resting on his forehead slides lower, hovering for a second over Harry’s throat. Harry swallows, feeling its weight on his Adam’s apple, not yet a threat, but a promise of one. He regrets the light emptiness it leaves behind as the palm creeps down and finally presses on his lower abdomen, next to his rigid cock. He breathes in and out slowly, its cool weight pinning Harry to his body, bringing back the awareness of the parts of him that are not his stretched arse. All his muscles are so tense they thrum and sing like a string; Merlin hisses when Harry clenches his arse around his fingers. 

Harry makes an effort to let go the way he does on missions, becoming a perfectly obedient instrument in Merlin’s hands. He craves it, relinquishing his choice and knowing that Merlin will break his fall. “Please,” he says, and Merlin obliges.

Merlin flips him over, and Harry tenses, and then relaxes under his weight. The first thrust makes him burrow deeper into the cushions, and then he tries to push up on his knees and elbows into it. It lost none of its strangeness, the haunting strain of Merlin moving in him. He cannot hold in a whine at the drag of Merlin pulling back before the slam down that rocks a shiver out of him. Merlin’s teeth scratch the back of his neck, not firmly enough to break skin or leave marks, but very much present, and Harry keens with the hungry want.

Merlin is prying him apart, but he is also the only thing holding him together.


	13. Chapter 13

“And if he’s not here, we are just needlessly scaring an elderly lady. Go sit in the car.” Merlin says, impatiently tapping his foot on the porch of a modest detached house listed as the current place of residence of Spencer’s former nanny.

“What, and let you have all the fun?” Harry leans back off the porch, trying to peer through a window, but old-fashioned lacy curtains obstruct the view. “I wonder if anybody’s home.”

“About last night-” Merlin says, and knocks on the door again without looking at Harry.

“We don’t have to talk about it. Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell,” Harry interjects, because he is fairly certain that there’s not an ending to that sentence that he would like.

Merlin distractedly rubs at the back of his neck. “I found heat inducers at Arthur’s flat, with three pills missing. It’s funny, really, how much can be changed by three pills.”

Harry grabs at his shoulders and turns Merlin to face him before he has time to think it through. “What?” Merlin twists under his grip, strong muscles rippling with the promise of violence should Harry press on. Merlin’s words from last night echo through Harry’s mind. That does explain why Merlin would try to persuade himself that Arthur was his, come what may, not that he had much of a choice; it does not explain what they should do about the whole mess. Harry yanks him closer, which is when the door swings open, almost hitting Harry and thus putting a stop to his doubts. The woman on the threshold, perfectly recognizable from the photographs if some fifteen years older, barely reaches Harry’s shoulder, yet she faces him down with a murderous glower. “Is he bothering you?” she asks Merlin.

Harry lets go of his shoulders and raises his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “We were just talking.”

“It’s not you I’m asking,” she snaps. “Boy, do you need to come in?”

Merlin shakes his head with an amused grin, and the woman relaxes somewhat. “It’s alright. Miss Appleton, we need you to pass something on to James.”

“Have not seen him since last Christmas,” she prickles and moves to the front, barring the door. From the firm set of her lips and a momentary flash of anxiety in her eyes, Harry immediately knows that she’s lying, and so, probably, does Merlin. 

“May we come in?” Merlin asks, holding the door in a seemingly casual gesture, yet Harry knows that Merlin would wrench the door open if need be. “It’s not really safe, and if he does come by-”

“I don’t know how I could be of help,” she says with a shrug, but steps aside as Merlin invites himself in. The woman is a fool to believe him to be non-threatening, Harry thinks, following him. A pregnant omega or not, Merlin is probably the most dangerous person in any room, easily all the more dangerous for everybody’s unwillingness to expect that of him. 

Something feral and furious coils tight in Harry’s chest when Merlin’s words finally sink in; for all his training, the one chink in Merlin’s armour would always make him a danger to himself, first and foremost, and to have it used against him- As he reaches out to touch Merlin’s wrist, craving the reassurance of his presence, his gaze drops to a pair of army boots tucked carelessly behind the shoes rack. Turning at the touch, Merlin follows the direction of his gaze, and then quickly glances up at miss Appleton with an abashed smile. “Could I bother you for a glass of water?”

As she disappears into the kitchen, Merlin quickly points him towards the upper floor. Harry nods and rushes towards the stairs, while Merlin pushes open a door to the drawing room. Harry is almost at the stairs as another door swings open, and miss Appleton crashes a cast iron frying pan on his head.

He goes down with an undignified yelp, his eyes watering at the sharp pain. “Ouch, that hurt!” he mouths as Merlin goes down on his knees next to him and pulls down his eyelid to check his pupil for signs of a concussion.

“We are here to help,” Merlin snaps, looking up at the woman, “no need for-”

He is cut short by a voice coming from the top of the stairs. “You have ten seconds to explain what you are doing here, or I’ll shoot. Miss A, if you could just step out of the way.”

Harry turns his head, pain reverberating in his skull at the sharp motion. Staring at them down the barrel of a Glock and a flight of stairs, James Spencer is noticeably unimpressed. “Oh great, we’ve found you. Our last interview was cut short, so I’m here for a follow-up,” Harry croaks.

Spencer does not lower the gun all the way, but some tension does drain out of his posture, which Harry takes for a good sign.

“I thought it was you when I saw the pictures in a newspaper,” Spencer says with disbelief. “You are the wanted man, the one who killed that-”

“Yes, yes, everybody wants me, news at eleven, let’s move on,” Harry grunts. “And, for the record, I was framed.”

“That’s what all alpha boys say, and the court usually listens,” Miss Appleton’s lips are pinched in obvious disapproval, yet the presence of a man with a gun makes her relax visibly.

“He _was_ framed,” Merlin reiterates, shaking his head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t say we are on the same team, but we share an adversary, so why don’t we assume that this unpleasantness never happened and move to a drawing room. You can keep your gun.”

“Your disregard for my suffering-” Harry mumbles, and is interrupted by Spencer.

“Thank you for your magnanimous offer,” with a sardonic frown, Spencer waves the Glock around in blatant disregard of gun safety procedures. Merlin’s hand is on the small of Harry’s back, mere inches away from a holster at the back of his belt, and that calms Harry down somewhat. Should the need arise, he knows, Merlin would probably have time to shoot Spencer before Spencer shot them.

“You don’t believe a word they said about Unwin, so why would you believe what was said about him?” Merlin frowns with exasperation, addressing Miss Appleton rather than Spencer this time.

Harry almost chuckles at this estimation of the power dynamics between the two, yet Spencer catches his nanny’s eye and finally, reluctantly, nods and marches them to a cramped drawing room without taking his gun off them for a second. As Merlin runs quickly over the scant facts they have, Miss Appleton brings him a glass of water smelling faintly of lemon juice.

“I’m the one you assaulted, yet I don’t even merit a glass?” Harry pouts at Miss Appleton as Merlin gratefully takes the offered glass.

“You don’t need it.” Then she nods gravely at Merlin. “Drink up, they say it helps for the morning sickness.” 

Harry looks up at him sharply. Merlin does look a bit pale and queasy, but then, who wouldn’t after sleepless nights in his den of an office? Merlin almost knocks the glass over in his haste to set it aside, and Harry curses silently. Hypothetically, he would kill for Merlin, but his lack of skill in noticing when help might be needed matches only Merlin’s lack of skill in asking for help.

Merlin leans back on the sofa and pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyes closed, he says, “So, Unwin was our one link to the OLF. If you remember anything, anything at all that he might have said-”

Spencer sets the Glock aside on the tabletop, still within easy reach, but no longer trained on them. He breathes in deeply and starts talking. “He did come to me right before he went MIA. I think he knew what was coming. He wouldn’t tell me much, because he said that he didn’t want to drag me down with him, but there was a tape, he said.”

“Did he tell you anything about its contents?” Merlin asks, suddenly alert and leaning forward. “Or whom he would take it to?”

Spencer just shakes his head. “Nothing, not for my lack of asking. He said we would wake up in a completely new England after it went public. Said it was the Gunpowder Plot, only foolproof. He was so scared.”

Merlin rubs at the bridge of his nose again. “And he was right to be. So are you, and there’s no shame in that. So am I.”

Fear is a natural part of every Kingsman’s life, like soreness in overstrained muscles or a shortened expected life span. It is not worth mentioning, Harry realizes, which is why it takes him by surprise when Merlin does, against all the unwritten rules. He leans to the side so that their hips touch lightly, relaxes into Merlin’s warmth.

Spencer’s hands on the table clench into fists as he stands up, having finally reached a decision. “He did leave me something, although I don’t see what use it could be. I’m not letting you keep them, mind, but there’s no harm in showing you the papers, I guess.”

The moment Spencer disappears behind the door, Harry hums, “Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.”

Merlin winces. “I wouldn’t take that at face value. Guy Fawkes’ Day’s today, that could be his memory playing tricks on him. We all like our rhetorical flourishes.”

Hovering over the Glock on the tabletop, Miss Appleton glowers disapprovingly. “If he said that that’s what the lad said, then so it was.” 

The rest of the wait passes in silence. Finally, Spencer walks back into the room and slides a sheaf of papers over to Merlin. As Harry leans closer to him to take a look, Spencer, his eyes brimming with amusement, asks, “What did you tell Evans when you visited the barracks?” 

As Harry frowns with incomprehension, Spencer specifies, “Evans, the lieutenant colonel at the base. I’ve never seen him that scared.”

“Just a promise of an internal investigation and a speedy demotion,” Harry murmurs, leaning into Merlin to try to read the documents over his shoulder. Merlin is tense, coiled like a spring, a strong frame of a trained soldier, and Harry sags against him at the thought of his humiliating vulnerability.

“And what did you promise to investigate?” Spencer asks, finally putting his Glock on safety.

“Oh, nothing in particular. I just made something up, or, rather, said something that my uncle used to say.”

Merlin is leafing through the pages too fast for Harry to glean much, his movements jerky and frantic. The papers look like bank account statements, but he’d need more time to make sense of them.

It takes him by surprise when Merlin, having reached the last page, turns sharply and breathes out into his face, “What did you tell the man?”

“It had nothing to do with this case,” Harry winces at his urgency, the testimony of a hope that he’s about to disappoint. “Something about the Ulster loyalists, about the army being in collusion with the radicals, a threat to civilians, the usual. I said this case could raise similar concerns, so-”

Merlin slams his fist on the table, the documents clutched in his fingers so tight that his knuckles go white.

“It’s you they wanted to frame,” Merlin says, “not me. It was about you all along.”

“You are not making any sense,” Harry says with condescension. “Please get back to me when you start making sense.”

Merlin hastily spreads the papers out on the table, his fingers leaving sweaty wet prints. “They thought you knew, and they tried to frame you to take you out of the game. Damn, it was on the table from the very beginning. Look, every fortnight, there would be this deposit to Unwin’s account. He would withdraw the money the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat. Could be his cover story, that they set him up as someone who could be blackmailed into cooperation, but with this,” he waves around indistinctly, “and once you actually add up the numbers, I don’t think it was about blackmail. I think the army is financing the OLF, through Unwin and god knows how many other agents. That would explain where the OLF gets the funds, and modern weaponry, and its recruits.”

“That one’s paranoid. I like him,” Spencer whistles appreciatively.

Harry frowns. “Other then the obvious dearth of evidence, I see two problems with your idea. One, why would anybody do that? Two, nobody would want to be on Kingsman’s bad side. Who else would do their dirty work for them?”

It’s Spencer who answers, bubbling with excitement and rubbing his palms appreciatively. “It makes perfect sense, you see. Valentine’s ratings of approval were at the record low in early summer, he had about zero chance of getting reelected. But now that he’s posing as our last line of defense against chaos and mayhem-”

Merlin barges in. “And he no longer needs Kingsman on his side if he can do the dirty work himself, to general applause no less. If he creates an enemy and conquers him.”

Harry folds his hands over his chest. “So, you are saying that they are staging something big, and quashing it. Aesthetically satisfactory if deeply unlikely.”

“Nothing says ‘season-appropriate festivities’ like blowing up the Parliament,” Spencer drawls, and offers his hand to Merlin for a handshake. Merlin shakes it.

“That’s worth checking out. If it does not pan out, we are back to square one, no skin off your nose.” Merlin’s almost begging, Harry realizes, and that scares him. “Are you in?”

Harry is fairly certain that he is surrounded by madmen, but he cannot say so when looking Merlin in the eye. Spencer is probably paranoid, and Merlin is likely too shaken by the discovery of last night to think straight. All the more reason for someone who has not taken leave of common sense to accompany them.

“Humour me,” Merlin says, and, grabbing Harry’s palm, brings it up to his lips for a kiss.

A wave of sympathy for him sweeps through Harry; Merlin was an eminently reasonable person, and the sharpest Harry knew. It causes him almost physical pain to see Merlin brought down to a position where he would be constantly struggling against the tide of fear and certainty that both his body and his bosses could and would let him down. One cannot be expected to be reasonable under the circumstances, he thinks bitterly, yet he cannot help feeling betrayed: by Arthur’s treason, by Merlin’s weakness, by a case that he cannot make sense of. Against his better judgment, Harry nods.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My knowledge of London topography (and pretty much everything else) is limited to google maps. Apologies for all the inevitable blunders.

Harry and Spencer are already in a small pub at Portland Place, with the BBC Broadcasting House in view, when Harry’s unwieldy mobile telephone finally gives a trill.

“I’m in. Be ready to make a move once I find it.” In stark contrast to his grim expression on the drive to London, Merlin sounds giddy with excitement, thrilled like a setter who caught a whiff of a duck. Harry’s uneasiness at letting Merlin go in alone finally melts away. Merlin deserves the mad drunk joy of the chase, and besides, he does know the Houses of Parliament better than Harry: that’s where his batch of recruits practiced a hostage situation, so he easily knows more ins and outs of the building than the guards. Harry does not have it in him to remind Merlin that there’s likely nothing to be found.

The line is quiet for a while, the silence interrupted only by dulled creaks and rattles as Merlin progresses down God knows what passages, and Harry’s about ready to hang up when Merlin says, “I’m glad you didn’t stay that night. That way, I can be certain that I love you. Not the bond, not the fluke of -”

“None of this farewell bollocks,” Harry snaps, his voice suddenly going hoarse. “Nothing that you will be embarrassed about when we have a celebratory pint later tonight. Just concentrate on the task at hand, alright?”

On the other end of the line, Merlin chuckles. “Aye aye, sir.”

Every bit a considerate gentleman, Spencer takes his time ordering them a pint while Harry screws his eyes shut and tries to regain his composure. Merlin’s words are usually an order, but he’s damned if he knows what he’s supposed to do with this. Now that the cards are on the table, Harry realizes that the bet might be higher than he has the courage to offer. Love is supposed to make everything easier, not shove a coil of worry, and possessive greed, and pride down his throat, into the darkness that anchors life and fears, but then, he’s lived with it for so long, much longer than he’s been consciously aware of it, that he does not know how to do without.

“Right,” Harry says as Spencer sets his pint down in front of him. “He is sweeping the building. If he finds the explosives, we storm Radio 4 and announce it while he defuses the bomb. It’s not like the captains of nuclear submarines check if Britain still exists by whether Radio 4 continues broadcasting, and it’s not like Valentine’s letters of last resort wouldn’t boil down to bombing everybody. Nothing can go wrong.”

“You don’t believe any of it, do you?” Spencer asks, tilting his head to the side.

Harry does care about Merlin’s wellbeing, but he feels no such obligations towards Spencer. He shakes his head decisively. “No shame in checking it out. There’s always that tape you mentioned, so we’ll keep looking.”

“Whatever you do next, count me in,” Spencer says, downing his pint.

Aiming for studied nonchalance, Harry slumps back in his chair. “Heroism does not pay these days.”

“Good thing I come from money then.”

Harry chortles. “Let me rephrase. Whatever notion of a valiant fight against injustice you might entertain in the dark recesses of your mind, it is likely misguided. Most of what you’d do would range from dishonourable to illegal, with collateral damage only marginally lower than the alternative, and in the end, it is no longer about ideals or doing the right thing, but rather, about those you trust, who are every bit as misguided and lost as you are. As a career choice, it has little to recommend itself.”

“No need to sound so condescending,” Spencer makes a grand show of sweeping an invisible speck of dust off his shoulder. “You are doing it for him, and that’s fine.”

Harry wants to protest, but there’s little he could offer as a counterargument, so he just settles for a scowl.

“Well, I was raised by Miss A, and I had Lee, and this whole mess leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Now we know that all it takes is several months for a whole group to be stripped of most rights that we take for granted, and for the hate to set in. We’ll just have to live with that knowledge-”

“I wonder why he doesn’t call,” Harry murmurs, cutting Spencer off, and glances at the clock on the wall.

“You don’t even believe him.”

“He’s a heavily armed omega, sneaking around the Houses of Parliament uninvited. Pardon me, but you hardly even need explosives to compromise his position.” However, Harry does not dare to call, not knowing what unwelcome attention an ill-timed noise might attract.

At that, the conversation peters out. Harry stares at his knuckles, trying not to let on just how stir-crazy he feels. The need to punch someone, and to keep fighting until there’s blood in his mouth and on his hands sweeps over him like a chilling, sobering wave.

Spencer checks his watch. “I wonder what’s taking him so long. We have another twenty minutes before my friend’s shift ends, and after that, we’ll really have to fight our way into the Radio 4 offices.”

“Well, it’s not like he can just waltz in,” Harry scowls, finding a let out for his anger. “Ever heard of avoiding the patrols?”

Spencer visibly makes an effort not to the respond, and Harry grudgingly admits that, contrary to his initial estimation, the man does have some survival instincts. He tries not to think of the stretching silence that could mean that Merlin’s working, but could equally mean that he was caught, tries not to think of the pain that could be incurred on that competent body that he relied on for his safety and pleasure.

The phone rings in another sixteen minutes; Spencer immediately springs up, ready to run and act, but Harry hesitates for a second, hoping for the best yet fearing the worst. When he finally picks up, Merlin sounds perplexed and lost. “There’s nothing here. I double-checked, and-”

Harry lets out an involuntary sigh of relief. “Never mind, there’s always the tape, so it’s not like we don’t have anything to work on. See you back at the manor. Just be safe, alright?”

He shakes his head at Spencer, finally daring to gloat. “Like I said, he didn’t find anything. But we will call you if anything comes up.”

Harry knows that they won’t, and so, probably, does Spencer, whose face twists in a disappointed grimace.

The fireworks start blooming across the sky, making a mockery of Harry’s state of mind, as he walks down to Savile Row. He scowls at the festive crowd milling about Oxford Circus, the mass of vulnerable humanity blissfully ignorant of its mortality, celebrating old death with blinding lights. He searches the surrounding faces for any sign of disquiet and finds none, as there probably won’t be any on his own face, if executions and hastily dealt justice were not such an intimate part of his life. The dulled explosions of fireworks make him wince: the travesty of long-averted explosions ridicule the much closer explosions, both past and those that are yet to come. Harry is busy shouldering his way through the crowd, and that makes him miss the exact moment when everything goes wrong.

“Dad, is it supposed to be like that?” a toddler perched at her father’s shoulders asks, pointing at something in the sky, and Harry does not even look up until more and more faces turn tense.

Dark greasy smoke is spreading over the sky, obscuring the lights. Harry is stuck in the crowd like a fly in molasses, and there is nothing he can do. With palms suddenly sweaty, he reaches for the telephone and dials Merlin, but the line is dead. He tries to fight his way onto a side street.

The smoke cannot be coming from the Houses of Parliament, Merlin checked the building, and Merlin was nothing if not thorough. Harry breaks into a run. He reaches as far as The Mall when he crashes into a thin line of mounted police and troops in riot gear. Harry breaks, trying to get his breathing back under control. The last thing Merlin needs, he thinks, is for Harry to get detained again, and nothing arouses suspicion as fast as a man racing towards an explosion sight. He strolls up to a policeman with a studied expression of idle curiosity. “Excuse me sir, what was that just now?”

“10 Downing Street just went up in flames, that’s what. The fuckers from the OLF, they say,” the man growls, scanning the crowd.

Harry retreats, wiping his palms on his trousers. At least Merlin was nowhere near the explosion. Merlin knows enough exits to make it to the Kingsman estate before Harry does. There are no reasons to worry, not just yet, and Merlin will crow and gloat forever about his one lucky guess that Harry dared to disbelieve. Everything will be fine, Harry tells himself over and over as he sprints to the tailor shop.

At the edge of his hearing, someone for the moment blissfully unaware of everything that happened sings,

_Guy Fawkes, Guy_  
Stick him up on high,  
Hang him on a lamp post  
And there let him die. 


	15. Chapter 15

Harry half-expects that Merlin will greet him at the estate with a new, perfectly outlined plan in hand. He practices his repartees on the ride back, all the “Ready to take on the whole wide world while the night is still young?” drowned out by the creaks and rattles of the train. The smile of his reflection, however, is unwavering and clear against the darkness beyond the window. 

There’s a tall figure slumped in a swivel chair in front of the monitors, and Harry rushes to him before the doors slide fully open.

“Merlin, you berk-”

The chair swivels around, and it is not Merlin staring Harry down but Arthur. Harry stops dead in his tracks.

“If I may ask, Galahad, where is he?”

Harry swallows hard. Arthur’s tone is perfectly conversational, gallant and smooth, yet he seems haggard, his skin a shade lighter even than his hair. The short answer to his question is unsatisfactory, while the long one is a twisted story, riddled by necessity with omissions and lies, and Harry is not certain if Arthur has the patience for it at the moment. 

“Or would you rather we had a cup of tea while I waited for an answer to a perfectly legitimate question,” he presses, looking up, and that is when Harry realizes that Arthur is pale with fury.

Somehow, that calms him down. Fury is good, fury will drag you forward like a hook lodged in your lip well past the point of giving up. There’s no love lost between Arthur and Harry, but Harry knows that Arthur, if need be, would turn heaven and earth to get Merlin back safely, much like he knows the same about himself, except that Arthur has more resources at his disposure. Harry looks him in the eye and says, “As you must be aware, sir, the OLF is a government-orchestrated pretext for a-”

Dimly, dully, Harry realizes that he hoped that Arthur would be enraged or surprised, for this is too crazy and too big for him not to be. Arthur isn’t. “Galahad, it is a simple enough question, even you should be able to follow. Where is he?”

Harry takes a cautious step back. “The Houses of Parliament for his last known location. That’s where the connection was lost, anyway.”

For a moment, Arthur scrutinizes him like one would an exciting new species of flesh-eating slime, and then rubs at his forehead in a tired gesture. “Of course, for why would he be anywhere else. He’s too sharp for his own good, but tell me, Galahad, what were you thinking?”

 

And there it is, the line between protective and possessive instincts sharp like the edge of a knife, slicing through Arthur’s mind, and through Merlin’s life. Harry clenches his fists. “My thoughts are hardly relevant, sir. He made that choice, sir, and he had the right to. We were all trained to do that. He is braver than most, and, having calculated the risks, he decided that preventing a terrorist attack that would be used as an excuse for a crackdown-”

Arthur cuts him short. “Oh God. Of course, he would do anything to maintain your faith in him, wouldn’t he? By the way, whatever it is that you are twiddling in your sleeve, drop it.”

Reluctantly, Harry lets a stun dart clatter to the floor. He notes silently that Arthur did not contradict his rendition of the conspiracy this time either.

Arthur nods contentedly and relaxes. “And now, listen carefully. Croon all you want about how brave he is, or how brilliant he is. You young ones tend to underestimate the most important part. _Alive_ is what he was, and I’m not sure if he still is. Follow me.”

Arthur gets up briskly from the chair, a predator with mad rage rippling through his muscles, and sets off towards his office. He does not hesitate before turning his back towards Harry. Harry’s shoulders sag at the realization that he got demoted from a threat to a minor nuisance, yet he does follow Arthur deeper into the mansion.

Arthur does not even bother to look at him as he starts talking. “Do you even know what it cost me to get him off the hook that first time? I told them it was just a lucky guess on your part, but they insisted on disposing of the Kingsman team that worked on the OLF. That’s the two of you, obviously. And still, I got him out of harm’s way.”

“If you are talking about mating, then some might call the price rather steep, sir.”

Arthur turns on his heels so fast that Harry almost bumps into him. “I even got _you_ off the hook, because a sorry excuse for a Kingsman is still a Kingsman. I said that the allegations of your involvement with the OLF would effectively disqualify you anyway. You are welcome.”

Harry freezes as the memories of the mess left of Butler’s head creep to the forefront of his mind. “Wait, and you killed Butler for that?”

There’s genuine indignation in Arthur’s voice as he draws his brows together and mouths “No,” and Harry almost, but not quite relaxes before Arthur adds, “Of course not. He got his hands on certain information that did not belong with him. I just added a certain spin.”

“You are not letting me out alive, are you?” Harry asks as they progress down the corridors.

There’s vindictive mirth in Arthur’s gruff laugh. “Your flair for the dramatic is not necessarily in good taste. What would I gain from that? And, with all due respect, what can you do that could possibly harm me?”

Arthur swings open the door to his office and invites Harry in with a gesture. While Harry looks around, taking in his surroundings, Arthur picks up a telephone and starts dialing. For a while, nobody picks up on the other side, and he keeps jabbing at the buttons with more and more force.

“Took you long enough,” he finally barks. “Chester King here. I believe you might have one of mine, erroneously detained around Downing Street. An omega, about six foot two, bald.”

“The Houses of Parliament,” Harry mouths as Arthur listens to what the man on the other end of the line says. Then Arthur bares his teeth.

“I’d tread lightly, if I were you. Before you decide on the optimal course of actions, pray consider how many of your men the tape would drag down- Fine, I’ll wait for your call.”

He crashes the receiver down with more force than necessary and rubs his eyes. With all the fight drained for a moment out of his posture, Harry can for an elusive second see an old man that Arthur will one day become, eaten from the inside by his power, and the rage he would not let out, and his inept perilous love. He sits down at the table and steeples his fingers in a gesture he belatedly recognizes as Merlin’s. “And all that for what? To get Valentine reelected?”

“Valentine is dead,” Arthur snaps without taking his eyes off his silent phone. “Our loss, of course. The man was a genius. Driven, like the lot of them, but a genius nonetheless. If only he had another term, he could have united Europe in his plan for green energy, and now he won’t.”

“Valentine’s dead?” Harry repeats dumbly. “But that was his plan, how can he-”

Arthur picks up a pen and twists it in his fingers until it snaps. “Do you think I sign off on everybody’s plans? I back off when I’m told to, if I think it prudential to do so, and I save my men for the day when they would save someone else, until I cannot.”

“But you knew about the OLF, and saw what that did to omegas around the country. And about their plan for the explosion.”

“That was not planned for today,” Arthur says with a polite little smile as his phone finally rings. “I see,” he says into the receiver, and drops it.

The room fills with a dank dense silence that pushes out the air until Harry can barely breath. His chest painfully tight, he finally asks, “What did they say?”

“That was the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and they don’t have him. They wouldn’t, if he’s under that pile of rubble. Tell me, Galahad, do you have a contingency plan for a life where you killed him because you respected his choices so much?”

And, for all his dismay, Harry never quite put it like that. He can imagine Merlin in danger, because danger wasn’t ever not a part of their lives, and he can imagine that getting Merlin back safely would be difficult, but Arthur was brilliant at overcoming difficulties, and he wasn’t half-bad himself. His imagination falls short, however, at a scenario in which he is late before he even plunges properly into action, with Merlin implacably, irrevocably gone. 

He doesn’t want to imagine a scenario in which Merlin took the plot into his own hands, but he finds it startlingly easy nonetheless. It might have horrified him, once upon a time, and it doesn’t now. Harry liked to think of Merlin as a reasonable man, yet there was little room left for reason in the low and dark place that he, and the other omegas, was being backed into. Harry thinks of his moments in prison, where all the choices he had left were to sink deeper into the hurt and to allow his body to betray his mind, and knows, deep down, that he would have done the same.

“Him and my child?” Arthur repeats, staring into the distance.

There’s a low amused chuckle from the door. “The child is mine, and that was a most enlightening conversation.”

Harry’s on his feet before his mind can even fully process the image of Merlin peering into the room, a new bruise forming on his cheekbone, visible even below the grime and soot, but delightfully, gloriously alive. There’s a new brittleness to him, the look of someone who met death and stared it down, the smell of smoke on him like something out of a distant era when London would still occasionally burn. _By God's mercy he was catch'd with a darkened lantern and burning match,_ indeed.

“Did you do it?” Harry asks before he can think better of it.

“Don’t say anything you would later regret.” Arthur raises a hand in warning. “Come here, darling. That was an unfortunate decision, but we will figure something out.”

Merlin winces at his command, but does not budge from his spot at the door. “A most entertaining conversation,” he drawls.

“Come here,” Arthur repeats, a hint of a growl bleeding through his voice.

Merlin hesitates, clutching at the doorframe as if struggling against the pull of an invisible string; “Merlin,” Harry starts, and does not continue, knowing that the man who answers to the name is pushed back by a feral and scared thing.

Merlin takes a step into the room, and then another one, and one more until he is right in front of Arthur.

Arthur pulls him into an embrace, his face hovering half a breath away from Merlin’s neck, over the angry scar. For a moment, he locks his eyes with Harry’s. “Galahad, you may leave.”

And Harry does.


	16. Chapter 16

Having made sure that there are plenty of other agents on call, Harry returns to his house for the first time in weeks, disconnects the phone and sets about reorganizing his book collection, still partly in boxes from back when he brought it over from his family home. He does not have enough shelf space yet, so by the time he’s done laying the books out in alphabetical order, the living room, the corridor and the kitchen are a neat yet sad little maze outlined in book stacks, a labyrinth abandoned by its Minotaur.

When he looks up to purvey his domain, wiping sweat and dust off his brow, he is startled to note that the sun is already high in the sky. He thinks briefly of shambling upstairs to the bedroom, but all strength seems to have left him with that last contented sigh, so he drops on the living room sofa and sleeps. He wakes up gasping every time he washes up on the shallow shoals of sleep, kicked into alertness by his own unconscious stirs; and crawls back into sleep as if it were a cave. In his dreams, London is burning, and he runs through the streets looking for something that he lost and cannot even remember, all the more frantic for a blank spot in his mind. If only he could remember- “Merlin,” he rasps, waking up, and curls back into sleep, clinging to the indeterminacy of dreams.

When he wakes up for good, it’s night again. The fridge is empty, and, although Harry knows full well that the police now have bigger fish to fry, he’s still apprehensive about venturing out into the city. So he makes do with a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from his collection as he sets about rearranging his books again. Alphabetical order, one has to admit, lacks a certain finesse; thematic order might take longer to arrange initially, but will surely make for a more felicitous experience down the line.

He contemplates, in the bright morning light, whether the lavish descriptions of camels wouldn’t push _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ over into the animal husbandry section when there’s a knock on the door. After a moment’s hesitation, he puts _The Seven Pillars_ into the geology section, and picks up the next volume. The knocking only gets louder, more insistent. Any person of good sense and manners would long have assumed that the house owner is indisposed and given up. That makes a breath catch in his throat: precious few of his acquaintances wouldn’t budge in the face of such considerations, and the police would probably have broken down the door by now. He throws on his dressing gown and rushes over.

“Took you long enough-” he stammers out, swinging the door open, before he realizes that it’s not Merlin on his doorstep but Lancelot, with his silver dress cane raised menacingly for another knock. Harry crosses his arms over his chest. “A swordstick? Really?”

Lancelot gives him an acerbic look. “Off with your vulgar pragmatism. I can allow myself the luxury of an object that exists only to serve its express purpose, thank you very much.”

Lancelot winces slightly as he takes in Harry’s disheveled appearance, but, of course, does not comment on it. Instead, he taps on his wristwatch. “And now, make yourself decent. I fully intend to become the next Arthur, and I need your vote. Which means that you’ll need to come up with a candidate for the Lancelot vacancy by 9 PM sharp tomorrow, by the by.”

“James Spencer is my candidate,” Harry says automatically, and then cautiously asks, “What happened to the Arthur we’ve had?”

“Oh, Merlin did. Said that while Kingsman is unconstrained by laws and the government, it has the moral duty or some such to hold others to a higher standard, which I would be inclined to agree with, personally, even if I find the idea of shooting a man in his own bed slightly distasteful. But then, that’s Scots for you.”

“You are probably the only person in Kingsman who would have ended that sentence like that,” Harry says, just to bide his time. His ribs feel too tight around his lungs and heart, and he cannot quite breathe.

“I probably am,” a corner of Lancelot’s lips creeps up in a wry smile. “Well, enough about that. Treason has done his worst, and that’s that.”

Harry still lingers at the door, not daring to ask. After a pause, Lancelot adds, “Merlin’s as fine as could be expected, under the circumstances. And now, go get dressed. We have an Arthur to elect.”

Harry does not have to be asked twice. He rushes upstairs and picks out a navy pin stripe suit, rinses his mouth and tries to comb his hair down into some semblance of order. There’s no excuse for not looking composed, especially when one isn’t.

He does his best not to think about Merlin. Not a month before, Merlin said with absolute, bone-deep certainty of the one who does not have much of a choice that he wouldn’t want to do without the bond. That was before he found the inducers at Arthur’s house, or before he knew that Arthur was behind the death of his friend, before he even knew the extent to which Arthur considered omegas expendable. 

None of that, Harry thinks, makes a difference to the way Merlin’s brain is wired, the reward circuits in his neurochemistry tied to the smell of his alpha. With a sudden chill, he realizes that, while he could compete with the living Arthur, he does not stand a chance against the dead Chester King, who was no longer a difficult and angry man but rather a bleeding rift in Merlin’s mental landscape. Harry’s angry at himself for the selfish thought, and all the more sorry for himself for that anger.

“Gawain believes that it was you who shot Arthur,” Lancelot says as the Kingsman cab drives them to the manor. “That you killed him and ran.”

“I wouldn’t have done either.” That is true too, he realizes as soon as he says it. He might have been tempted to hurt Arthur, for dragging Merlin into the bond that the man didn’t want if not for his schemes that he wouldn’t pretend to understand or care much about; but Arthur was now Merlin’s, for good or ill, and hence off-limits.

Most knights are already gathered at the Round Table when they enter. Harry has not seen everybody in the same room since that morning, over three months ago now, when the OLF case first landed in their laps, and the realization makes him go still. Here they are again, on a related matter, with Merlin clutching the clicker of the projector as usual, but there’s enough blood, betrayal and helplessness stretching between then and now that the other side of the room seems like a distant unreachable shore. It takes Lancelot’s prodding for him to take a step forward.

Valentine’s face is frozen on the projector. Briefly nodding to Lancelot and Harry, Merlin starts the video.

“This is the tape that Lee Unwin, who, we believe, must have refused to play along once he figured out his place in the scheme, smuggled out and brought to Noel Butler, and that was later picked up at his flat by Chester. All three, of course, are now dead, if for different reasons,” he says, crossing his arms. Harry can see his shoulders tremble with the strain.

On screen, Valentine calls on the nation to unite in this dark hour of need, when even Westminster, the symbol of stability, was reduced to smoldering rubble. The state of emergency, he says. Deploying the military, he says. It wouldn’t have been nearly so funny if Valentine didn’t proclaim all that while standing on the Norman Porch, in front of the unscathed Palace of Westminster. The flair for drama seldom goes hand in hand with common sense, Harry reckons; God bless those that love needless rehearsals.

The man who was Lancelot is crowned as their next Arthur, his smug smile in stark contrast to Chester King’s habitual grim resolve. As the knights file out of the room, Harry falls behind, memories of the meeting three months ago lapping hungrily at reality. Merlin is gathering up the documents strewn over the table, and Harry gnashes his teeth with the need to reach that other, past Merlin, not blithely trusting exactly, but more relaxed, inexplicably softer, the man who is long gone. That one was easier, he acknowledges through exhaustion and weakness, but he’ll get to know this one too, and learn to love him just as well.

He plops down at the far corner of the table. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

Merlin just jerks one shoulder in a noncommittal half-shrug. “Did you hear that the heir to the throne came out as omega? He called for reconciliation, made quite a speech, and quite a spectacle of himself.”

Harry had had other worries over the last few days, and now’s the first time he’s coming to regret it. “Who’s the next in line?”

“I believe we are keeping that one,” Merlin says grimly, “although he’s a horrible poster boy for the omega cause. All that is wrong with alphas instilled in him through nurture, multiplied by his own temper issues.”

His tone is perfectly flat throughout, impassive not with the habit of control but rather with weary indifference. Harry covers the distance between them in three strides and presses his fingers to a black bruise on Merlin’s cheekbone.

Merlin winces and takes a step back. “Don’t touch me. The last thing I need is everybody believing that I did it for you. Just for the record, it’s mostly for the child, so that it won’t have to. Well, and for myself.”

“But it will be an alpha,” Harry does not have it in him to tell Merlin that that seems to be what some knights think anyway, so he concentrates on the lesser flaw in Merlin’s reasoning. “It will, I can smell it.”

Merlin’s face is frozen in a confused look, like he’s not sure whether he wants to laugh or punch Harry, but at least it’s the first honest reaction Harry sees on him that day. He presses on, “And it will need an alpha role model. I volunteer, of course.”

“The universe in which you are considered a good role model is doomed,” Merlin says in amiable disgust.

“But we will go out with a bang, and it will be glorious.”

His face goes red with mortification as Merlin bends over laughing, his forehead pressed to the tabletop. “No pun intended,” he adds uncertainly.

After a while, Harry’s no longer sure if it’s mirth or hysteria, but he sits down next to Merlin and watches him with gratitude, the most marvelous thing he has ever seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, while prowling the dark recesses of dressing-room3, as one does, I suddenly noticed that a prompt "Merlin ends up begging Harry Hart to mate him" does not specify that Harry agrees, does it, and that got me thinking. A month, more words than I thought myself capable of, and more plot twists than I know how to handle later, it's done! \o/
> 
> Thanks to themodernmerlin for an awesome prompt, to cathexys and marina for convincing me that even banal plotbunnies are worth writing, and to all the kind & generous souls who read along despite the drama and the weird stuff. You are all awesome <3
> 
> I've promised a happy ending often enough that I feel like a happy family schmoop epilogue is owed, so that might still happen (btw, prompts, anybody?), but all in all, it's done, it's my longest fic, and this fact, if little else about it (because everything looks so much better in one's head than on paper, doesn't it?), fills me with an inordinate amount of pride, yay.


End file.
